You see, I became a cancer survivor myself last year - so I am grateful to these charities for all their hard (and often un-noticed) work; please help me help other people survive this disease too by taking just a few moments to write your own review of my blog on Technorati.

For every review written about this blog, I will donate $10 to Cancer Research charities on your behalf.

How To Contribute

It’s quite simple, and takes only a few minutes.

You can add your review by going to this page on the Technorati site: http://technorati.com/blogs/www.simonstapleton.com/wordpress

Add your review into the box (see image right) by typing a title for your review and then your thoughts about my blog in the Body section.

And please don’t forget to choose the Twitter This option too!

If you don’t have a Technorati login then you will be prompted to set one up which takes a matter of seconds.

The Money Raised

I will send the funds raised on the first day to Association for International Cancer Research (www.aicr.org.uk)

Please Help

Charities suffer big time during recession. Donations to charities are often the first things cut when household income comes under strain. Let me source the funds - all you need to do is write a review!

MANY THANKS in ADVANCE

Simon Stapleton

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

The Become a Smart and Effective Freelancer course was due for launch on July 1st… But time ran out for me this month! It’s been a hectic mêlée of juggling several projects on the go so I decided to push the launch of this course out so that I can make sure I don’t rush it and deliver top quality content.

Become a Smart and Effective Freelancer will now launch on August 1st 2009!

The Become a Smart and Effective Freelancer Course Outline

When you complete the objectives of this course, you will have mastered…

• How To Use Learning to Enhance Your Freelance Business and Boost Profits
• How To Enjoy Quality Feedback
• How To Use Feedback to Optimize Your Business for Customer Satisfaction and Increase Profits
• How To Assess New Opportunities and Destroy Threats to Your Freelance Business
• How To Build a Customer-Centric Business Change Strategy

SPECIAL OFFER!

Receive a 50% Discount off Become a Smart and Effective Freelancer by pre-registering your request for the Free Course Overview! Just fill out the form below:

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

If you’re not in the fixed-price project game (rather, you offer your knowledge and expertise as a service) then you’ll know that it is a tough game to increase your price in accordance with your costs. You want to achieve the same profit margin. You may also want to re-price the gig if you low-balled to start with (possibly to prove your capability and lower the risk to your customer). You inevitably have to raise the subject with your customer, and it’s often a nervous occasion that can also be explosive. It’s amazing, though, that 88% of freelancers I surveyed don’t include escalation rates into the pricing of the deal. In other words, the expectation that rates will increase, year-on-year, is never set. So no wonder it goes down like a sack of shit.

Firstly, it’s a Reasonable Request!

Customers should be used to paying escalating fuel bills. Wages go up most years (I say MOST, perhaps not during recession) and business rates (premises tax) go up too. So why should your customer expect you to provide services at the same rate every year? Fascinatingly, they often do. But who can blame them? If they can deter your rate increases, it saves their organization money. So it’s in their interest to use whatever levers they can to deter it (although not always resist it - they still need to buy your services, after all). Such levers might be a play on your relationship, or perhaps a reminder of ‘the prevailing economic conditions’, or maybe even quote some fictitious company policy (I’ve seen it done!) It is a negotiation, through and through. And often a heavy one.

You Might Avoid Such Heavy Negotiations…

The solution is to create that expectation, right up front. This may cause a stir in your customer, and may even put them off somewhat, but it’s much better to be totally transparent about it rather than wait until you stick another contract in front of your customer. Your relationship (I would expect) is to be based on trust, and with trust comes transparency.

And when it’s time to renew a contract, make it clear beforehand that your price is going up. I advise you to make this very explicit when conversations about your contract are under way, perhaps not to the point of obsession, but don’t leave any doubt that rates will be changing. The ‘Business Planning’ process in most companies involves lengthy discussions on budgets, and this process often happens annually around the same time. For one customer, the process begins in July where business plans and budget are set for the following calendar year (the fiscal year). Now, if I was to leave the conversation about rate increases once July is through, then my customer (if they were to accept my increase) will already be set to overspend before the fiscal year even begins!

So to avoid an angry (or reluctant) customer, make sure you a) find out the annual business planning cycle, and b) warn of your (agreed) rate escalation before the process begins.

What escalation rate should you use?

This largely depends on  your industry. The most common rate is the  inflation rate of your currency, but this doesn’t always work. Some industries are very sensitive to price fluctuations in raw materials such as metals and the cost of oil.

Alternatives to inflation may be suitable. Consider, instead, using your country’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) which is the average price increase of retail items such as food, clothing, household fuel bills, etc, which is probably the most appropriate if you work from home.

It’s really something to discuss with your client as your choice has implications for both of you. Inflation and CPI vary at different rates and at different values. In 2009, inflation went to below 1%, although negative inflation (’deflation’) rarely happens due to government intervention. CPI, however, is a more ‘truthful’ view of how costs change, particularly for a freelancer, and can dip below 0% into negative - as indeed it has in 2009. So an escalation rate that mirrors or tracks CPI could mean that you actually lower your rates instead of increasing them.

What if your customer doesn’t like, or agree to, the increase?

Put simply, you have gained a choice. You can choose to not increase your rate and accept lower profit for the next year, or walk away. And your choice is at the right time - not moments before renewal. At least this way you have an opportunity to close the gig off on the right terms and not burn all your bridges. Besides, in about 50% of cases, customers eventually accept your increase before the gig is over because they can’t replace you.

The disasterous alternative is to leave it to last minute to attempt an increase in your rate - and I’ve seen it dozens of times - customers think you’re trying to ‘have them over a barrel’ and respond irrationally… they tell you to piss off.

In Summary…

One thing for sure is if you don’t set the expectation that rates will change as the economic conditions change, it will be a surprise to your customers (whether it’s genuine or an act of pretense). If you avoid the conversation because you fear a backlash, then you’re consigned to the said surprise, or instead you’ll be impacting your profit margin year-on-year as you keep your rates the same.

Only when you’re clear and upfront will you be able to negotiate and engage on the subject. If you don’t know your customer sufficiently well to gauge how they will react, then it really is time you found out!

In recognition of this quandry, I will soon be launching a course designed for freelancers that gives you the method and tools for obtaining and responding to customer conflict and feedback:

Become A Smart and Effective Freelancer

All I can say right now is that this course gives you all you need to engage your customers smarter and build transparency and trust. It will launch on July 1 2009 to a limited number of freelancers - only 50 places will be available at launch.

Pre-registration will be available soon, so subscribe to my RSS feed and find out when!

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

We’re all sold dreams of success and wealth - it’s what we’re bombarded with in the media and those annoying emails you get. Truth is, only a small percentage of us become that wealthy. The recession has reminded us that the economy is volatile, and heavily balanced on risk. But still, we’re told that riches are ours if we buy this product or that.

Here is the problem: many people expect to become millionaires overnight without really doing anything. At best, they think that a small burst of effort brings the rewards home. Life ain’t like that! If it was that easy, we’d all be following that path. And if we all follow it (and indeed, we are successful), then the reward will be diluted to the point that it’s worthless.

So who becomes a millionaire? Except those who inherit, or win the lotto, the people who make the big bucks are the people who take risks and apply themself with clarity of purpose . Let me emphasize this: it takes both of those things to be a millionaire.

You can take risks… invest in a startup, take that course, become an expert in XYZ technology… but without clarity of purpose and application, they remain as pure potential that is never realized. Application with clarity of purpose is the way we turn risks into opportunities that pay.

What do I mean by ‘application with clarity of purpose ?’

I mean this: you focus your effort and energy towards a clear goal envisaged by a powerful vision. It’s about knowing why, what and how.

Too many people ‘do stuff’ without really knowing why they’re doing it - they’re automatons without freedom and choice. When we have clarity of purpose, we know why we do stuff, how we do it and what it aims to achieve. And then the real magic comes when our clarity of purpose creates passion !

People without clarity of purpose (and the vision which creates it) will never be millionaires. Instead, they will meander through work and life not knowing why they do what they do.

One of the reasons why clarity of purpose doesn’t materialize is that it takes momentum to build it up. Small failures can create lost confidence and a drop in energy, leaving doubts and confusion. Truth is, most of us give up far too easily. It takes real courage to get back on the bicycle after a fall… but if we didn’t pluck up that courage the bicycle industry would have gone bust decades ago.

Do you give up too easily? Do you let your aspirations to become wealthy wither and die because of a metaphoric graze on the knee? Then I say you lack clarity of purpose.

The other reason why momentum doesn’t build up is because folks don’t play to their strengths. They do jobs because they can, but not necessarily because they’re good at it (or enjoy it). When we don’t use our strengths, we’re destined to repeat failures over and over again - it becomes a prison in our minds - a stagnating place where we don’t grow and develop or take risks. It’s amazing how many people are like this, but perhaps don’t even realize it. It’s only when they take a long look at themselves to identify their strengths do they also identify their passions and desires, and then a vision.

Find out the benefits of playing to your strengths in my Free eBook ‘The 10 Habits of Highly Effective IT Professionals‘ - download it today.

This ain’t the end of this piece. Soon, I want to tell you about how you can get back on track to becoming a millionaire (or whatver you desire) by building clarity of purpose . Find out when by subscribing to my RSS Feed !

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Many organizations have ’strong’ cultures that set them apart from others. We can look to Dr. Fathi El-Nadi (who writes his article ‘Examples Of Strong Corporate Cultures’ ) for some examples:

• Wal-Mart. Founder Sam Walton’s concern and respect for staff from the foundation of the company creates an environment of trust that persists to this day. Walton met staff, calling them by their first name and encouraged change to maintain the competitive edge. To this day, staff think about “how Sam would have done it”.
• Southwest Airlines. Its relaxed culture can be traced back to unconventional CEO Herb Kelleher, who encourages informality and wants staff to have fun at their jobs. Employees are valued, with Kelleher acknowledging births, marriages and deaths by notes and cards. Staff are encouraged to pitch in and help out, especially at check-in, giving Southwest turnaround times less than half the industry average.
• Hewlett Packard. Problems several years ago encouraged HP to change its culture; staff are required to formulate three personal and three professional goals each year, and are encouraged to cheer those that meet them, such as getting away early to be with family. Two years into the program, HP reports no loss in productivity despite staff working shorter hours and there is an increased staff retention rate. The program has been marked by the extent to which managers bought in, and modeled it in their personal lives.

The first two are examples where the founders have a heavy influence on the culture. Their organizations are created in their image, if you like. The organizations’ cultures reflect the principles, behaviours and style of their leaders. This is true for your ‘organization’ too - your freelance business.

Let’s face it - it’s unlikely that you’re going to create a business that isn’t akin to how you like to behave, and work. Why would you intentionally create a workplace that doesn’t fit you? If you did, you’d be crazy! But have you considered that this is a truism? Does your organization reflect your personality as you see it? More importantly, what do your customers think about your business… and what (in turn) does this say about you?

Laura Spencer (who I think is a great writer at the excellent blog FreelanceFolder.com ) tells us that in her long experience as a freelancer, she has seen 10 different freelancer types that have a strong effect on how business is done.

Laura says:

It can be fun and helpful to examine these freelancing personality types. Often times your freelancing personality type can show what makes you act the way you do as a freelancer.

Laura takes a light-hearted view - this analysis gives us a general view of the effect of personality rather than being a rule - although consider the point I made above: what do your customers see, and then infer about you as a person?

Well I hope to help you answer that question soon so you can understand how your customers view you and your business with the principle benefits being:

• Increased Customer Satisfaction and Engagement
• Increased Profits
• Lower Operating Costs
• Lower Business Risk
• Your Satisfaction and Increased Confidence
• Services Tuned and Optimized for Your Market
• Less Work, More Play

As a freelancer, it’s YOUR personality and behaviors that define, to what extent, how you achieve the above. They’re in YOUR hands! If you don’t know how your customers or associates perceive you, then how will you be effective in realizing them? Only by understanding how the world sees you will you know, and have choices how to respond. In this case, ignorance is NOT bliss…

As I said, it’s in your hands. However, sometimes we don’t know where to start! In recognition of this dilimma, I will soon be launching a course designed for freelancers that gives you the method and tools for obtaining and responding to customer feedback:

Become A Smart and Effective Freelancer

All I can say right now is that this course gives you all you need to realize the benefits above by engaging your customers smarter. It will launch on July 1 2009 to a limited number of freelancers - only 50 places will be available at launch.

Pre-registration will be available soon, so subscribe to my RSS feed and find out when!

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Heck, you got out of corporate-ville for a reason – you want to be in control and probably earn stacks of cash whilst you do, but your penalty is the uncertainty and effort you need to put in, often during unsociable hours.

However, it doesn’t need to be difficult if you follow some basic steps and your common sense which will keep you sane and your head level as a successful IT freelancer.

Be Upfront With Everyone Right From The Start – Be upfront with everyone you associate with (friends, family, customers and associates) that you’re a freelancer and your job is to earn revenue to keep the business moving. Spend as much time as you need to explain that you will focusing on your business, especially when you’re launching it, and that you will be devoting a lot of time to building it up. You’re making a commitment, and you need their support.

It’s important to be crystal clear that your intentions are to build a successful business – not line your pockets or act as a charity. Share your view of timeframes and key events which you are working to, and make sure that people understand that during those key events you won’t have time for anything else.

Keep Your Expenses As Low As You Can – Your income is going to be unpredictable! Some months will be bear with very little coming in, and then some will also feel like bumper months. It’s important to avoid spending too much during those bumper months, as your next one maybe arid! So don’t go and blow cash on a new iPod because your bank balance increased by more than the usual monthly amount.

It take discipline to view income as a long-term benefit and keep your costs low whilst you can predict how the money will be spent or pay your taxes.

Plan To Make Considerably More Than Your Target Income – You’ve got to aim high as in reality it’s rare to earn more money than you expected to. If you need $4,000 per month to cover business expenses and your personal income, then aim much higher – say $10,000. So your sales and prospecting activities need to target $10,000 in order to ensure that when reality bites, you can cover the bills and your income.

When you predict revenues that barely cover your expenses you will inevitably have to lower your expenses or take less income during bare months.

Look For ‘Cross-Sells’– Getting a foot in the door is a prized outcome for salespeople. Making an initial sale often leads to more sales of complimentary or higher value products. Why should you be any different? One you have built a stable relationship with a customer, begin to look for opportunities to cross-sell other services to your client. This could be anything from simply more of what you are currently contracted to delivery (OK, not strictly a cross-sell) to selling in the services of an associate, which you could take a small cut or fee from. Use the fact that you have already sold to your advantage.

Be A Savage Invoicer – As a permie, you wouldn’t take crap from your boss if your salary was late. Would you? So why accept excuses and breaking of your payment terms from your customers? As a freelancer, cashflow is king. You must be totally ruthless in holding your customers to their payment terms and chasing every invoice, even if you have to pay someone to help you do it for a while. Once a customer is allowed to slip once, then they’re much more likely to slip again. [See my other article on chasing invoices here.]

Plan Your Week, Ahead – There is an old proverb ‘He who fails to plan, plans to fail.’ Just because you’re an independent freelancer, it doesn’t mean this won’t apply to you! I’ve found it easier, in fact, to slip on projects if you don’t have a boss supervising you. The result: a disappointed customer, and no repeat business.

It’s a simple remedy: create a weekly schedule of activities where you’ll track your projects, report to customers, create and send invoices, etc. And stick to it! Without the discipline to stay on plan, you’re putting your business at risk.

Another side-effect of being more rigorous in your planning is that you have greater visibility of how much time administration activities take, giving you a choice to a) stay as you are, b) make them more efficient by improving your process or finding tools to help you, or c) outsource them entirely. Having the knowledge gives you the option.

Minimize Loafing - Permies have some leeway in how much non-productive time they can spend. You must have done it, or seen it: it’s the browsing the web during the lunch, or chatting about the game last night to your colleagues. Not all time in the work place is productive. As a freelancer, this time - loafing - is at your cost. Because you won’t be getting paid for it. The occasional ‘five minutes’ can add up to many hours during a week, and it’s these hours that are burnt income. This isn’t the same as taking a break - it’s important to factor in down-time during your day to recharge batteries - this is the wasted time you lose due to being distracted.

It’s much easier to be distracted at home due to your home comforts, TV, and the trappings of hobbies. Just as Drew Douglass says in ‘Mistakes I Made as a Freelance Web Developer and How To Avoid Them’ : 

 just because we work from home doesn’t mean that we should act like we are at home all the time

You have to monitor what distracts you - is it the TV? The Radio? Your favorite porn-site? Tweet alerts from TweetDeck? Whatever it is, if it’s causing you to loaf then quit it before it costs you dearly!

Choose The Right Projects at the Right Time – Once your business gets off the ground and, with good tidings, customers are coming to you (rather than you chasing work), you will have choices in which projects you do, and when. Often, you will be delivering more than one project at the same time. It’s real important to focus on the right project at the right time. It’s tempting to keep switching between projects on a whim, but the process of switching mode absorbs a lot more time than you might realize and the outcome is reduced productivity. So it’s an absolute must to choose projects that are ‘congruent’, that is, have common aspects that enable you to optimize your delivery. For example, two concurrent projects where one is based on the West Coast, and the other on the East Coast won’t allow you to travel between customer sites often and easily.

Complete and Finish – I am not a natural Completer-Finisher. This puts me at a disadvantage. As a Freelancer, you don’t get paid until the job is done (generally speaking). So not pushing a project to completion and starting another means that you won’t get your invoice honored. I have to really push myself to complete a project so I can get the bill out. Finish… and get paid!

Be Courageous in Calling Out a Bad Project, as a Bad Project - Sometimes, a project doesn’t go to plan. Maybe your customer has changed their minds too often, or you’re not equipped to deliver like you thought you were. Your heart might not be in it. For whatever reason, some projects just don’t happen in the way you expected, and it’s a courageous freelancer who puts a project on hold to rectify the problem. 

Here’s the thing - not calling this out hurts you more in the long-run. Why? Well these projects tend to cost you more, they don’t deliver to customer’s requirements, they damage your reputation, they damage your confidence, and they’re NOT FUN. Mustering the courage to call this out in order to correct it is the best thing you can do. Sometimes, you just have to drop the project all together. Or a crisis talk with your customer is an opportunity to make essential changes. Better late, than never. 

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

What’s more, this report tells you an estimate of the number of jobs available and the average salaries for IT consultants and developers in these cities.

It’s backed up by data from PayScale . If you haven’t used it yet, PayScale give you free access to their average salary calculator for your role and location. This is a great tool for assessing whether you’re current pay rate is fair, or if you’re considering moving to another city.

You can use PayScale’s right now (US and Canada only) by checking out my article here .

Does this give you a sigh of relief, or compound your worries? Please leave a comment and tell us how you feel about the results of this report.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

The risks are enormous…. well that’s the perception. The thing is, in our minds full of doubt and uncertainty, we can make the problem feel much worse that it really is. But of course, unless you’ve done it before, it’s also difficult to believe that statement! No matter how ready we might feel to actually make a success of a freelance venture, quitting can rarely seem the easier task. Maybe these things are going through your mind…

• I don’t have large SAVINGS account
• I am scared of doing the WRONG thing
• I am scared of FAILING
• I don’t want to end up working harder than I already am
• I don’t have a business that could replace my income
• I am worried about what my family will think if I left my JOB
• I am worried about what my friends will think
• I don’t know what I want to do that I really LOVE

Sound familiar? So what do you do?

Do you:

• Keep your job until some magic event waves away all the fear? No.
• Leap anyway even though you don’t know what you will actually do once you have? No.
• Forget all about it. Maybe this permanent job where I am told what to do isn’t so bad after all. NO!

Here is the Answer…

If you can muster the courage (and save up some money) then the best way forward is to seek help from someone who knows how, and knows all the pitfalls to avoid.

Your leap of faith, like a bungee, needs a safety cord.

Your ’safey cord’ is getting help from an experienced entrepreneur or business coach .

Finding a Business Coach

If you want to improve your golf swing, who do you see? That’s right, a golf coach. If your kid if falling behind on math, what then? Yes, you bring in a math tutor. A Business Coach is someone who has helped people with this challenge many times over .

Your situation is unique, yet a business coach will know how to help you make the leap after only a few sessions. Your business coach will prompt you to discover the real issues behind your uncertainty and provide you with ideas to overcome them. It’s so much easier, and quicker, to deal with these complex problems with someone who has experience.

Business coaches should be easy to find - sometimes as simple as looking in the Yellow Pages, and I also recommend you use your network or social network to find a coach in your local area that comes with recommendations. You could even tweet that you’re looking for a coach - try it!

Business coaches will charge varying rates, from as little as $50 per hour right up to $5,000 per hour ! Obviously, find a coach that you can afford, but don’t necessarily go with the cheapest if you can’t find a recommendation.

An Alternative…

Let me introduce you to something I found recently: ExitMyJob .  Here is where Bryant Jones shows us how to successfully exit from your permanent job and enter the realms of freelancing and entrepreneurialism through soul-searching, careful preparation and skillful execution.

It was not that long ago I was struggling in a JOB I loathed… - Bryant Jones

This isn’t a guide on how to set up your new freelancing business (there is a great one here, so use that one), rather, it is a coaching program that prepares you for the change by helping you examine your dreams and desires, plan how you want to escape permanent, deal with challenges and resistance and build up a team of associates.

It’s not a template for a resignation letter - it’s far more than that! What I like about ExitMyJob is that it guides you through all the stages you will take to do a proper job of exiting the workplace, step-by-step. It does this by making sure that you are ready and able to quit, by taking you through a journey of self-analysis and self-testing. It’s also more than the typical module-based self-study course; with Bryant you will thoroughly engage with him to get right into the psychy of the challenge you face, through 12 live job sessions where . And more than that too - with Bryant you will develop a life plan that takes you beyond the resignation to form a roadmap of your ‘dream life’.

It isn’t cheap. ExitMyJob is priced at $497 (reduced from $1,997) but I think that this is a good price if it delivers its promise to you. Even then, if it doesn’t deliver, you can ask for your money back with the 100% guarantee. So $497 could offer you great value if it means it sets you on the road to be your own boss and enjoy the benefits and lifestyle of a freelancer.

ExitMyJob is perfectly suited to a frustrated permie who has a compelling desire to be a freelancer, but isn’t confident in making the leap.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Recession may be making you doubt yourself, or create a drop in motivation, or perhaps you’re feeling unloved by your boss. Or perhaps you’re just overwhelmed and you’re cutting corners. There are many reasons why your discipline drops.

What do you do about it?

Leo Babauta on his blog Zen Habits tells us that there are some small things we can do that can make a big difference (ain’t that true of most problems?)

My favorite of his list is the first one: Forgive Yourself. If you don’t do this then all the other things won’t really make much difference - at least in the short term.

This is what Leo has to say:

Forgive yourself. You aren’t perfect. No one is. Realize that beating yourself up will only make things worse. Take a few slow, deep breaths and let it go. Forgive yourself. And move on.

To be honest, I am not good at this. I am my own worst critic. I set high standards for myself and a lot of time, I fail them. I won’t stop doing this, but I must learn to not be so hard on myself when failures happen. In truth, it takes a while for me to recover!

But one realization I’ve just been through is in fact Leo’s point number 2: Realize that discipline is an illusion. Discipline doesn’t have shape or form, it is a concept of the mind. Because of my high standards, often I don’t see discipline where other people do. So I am not necessarily going to be persecuted by other people if I feel I lack discipline. It’s my problem… nobody else’s!

Check out the rest of Leo’s article here:

http://zenhabits.net/2009/05/6-small-things-you-can-do-when-you-lack-discipline/

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

This is the advice from guru Seth Godin.

Seth’s point is an important lesson: no matter what has been spent before, make the right choice going forward. Making decisions that are biased towards sunk costs are irrational.

Let me quote an example from Seth’s article:

You have two pieces of land. One you bought for $1,000,000, one for $10,000. On which one should you develop a gas station?

I know. The one that’s right next to the huge subdivision being put up, not the one next to the condemned shopping center. Does it matter how much the land cost to buy? No. Not at all.

In other words, don’t make a decision to throw good money after bad, but instead make the right decision based on current conditions.

If you’ve spent $10,000,000 on a IT system, and need to spend another $10,000,000 on it, but then a newer, better system comes on the market for only $5,000,000 that does everything you need - what should you do?

You should ditch the old one and go with the new.

Problem is, as human beings we don’t like to think we made bad choices. The guy who chose to spend $10,000,000 on the new system doesn’t want to be shown up. But who cares? Was that decision made with the knowledge that an even newer system would come along for just $5,000,000? Probably not. Making the decision to go with the cheaper system is the right thing to do, and no penalty should go with the choice.

But this is what happens - decision makers *do* throw good money after bad to avoid being exposed as foolish. But the fool is the one who doesn’t do the right thing with currently available information!

In the current economic climate, this is a reckless act of lunacy.

As Seth says: Ignore Sunk Costs.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

‘Price’ is a complex combination of real costs, emotional costs, perceived benefits (not always real ones), and expected profit. Unfortunately for us there is no accounting method for determining price based on all of the above factors. It’s also unfortunate for buyers too, so we’re all subjected to the same complex situation.
Existing pricing methods do not cover all the components. Cost-plus pricing could not be used because it deals with accounting cost plus expected profits. Value based pricing is based on the perceived benefits. Performance based pricing deals with outcomes only.

Price can be very subjective - especially around services pricing . For example, the prices for two software developers on a single development project can be very different, but the outcomes could well be the same. The client makes a subjective assessment on what factors they would use to judge rates of the individual programmers. The individuals may find it difficult to justify their rate back to the client.

A traditional approach is to determine your costs (often by intelligent guesswork), negotiate profit hard (without necessarily disclosing your costs) and schmooze the rest over an expensive dinner. It’s a tactic used by both customer and provider. It’s a game of wit and charm, and how great that meal tasted or how fine the wine is. The process is time consuming, costly, and lacks transparency. It assumes that rewards of finery create leverage for negotiation based on the pretext of a ‘good relationship’.

It also assumes that the social, political and economic agendas of both sides are irrelevant!

Schmoozing is not the way to set a price. It’s a risky method and it’s easy to be swept up in the moment. Avoid it!

Many ‘factors’ affect your costs, your profit margin and the good-will you apply in order to set a price. You won’t be sensitive to the same factors to each customer, not will those factors have the same weighting/impact. I can explain this best by giving you some examples:

• Will you set the same price for two customers when one of those customers costs you a lot more to service due to their poor management discipline?
• Would you set the same price for a gig that helped a business who clubbed seals for profit as you would a different gig for a charity that helped people, like your grandmother, pay their heating bills during the winter to survive?
• Or what if you’re a democrat pitching for a gig with your state’s democratic headquarters? What will you do then?

Here’s what you’ll do. You’re going to want to price yourself differently based on a number of factors you determine. But how do you do it?

The answer is that you will learn how to adjust prices against a number of factors through experience, or through the wisdom of a financial expert. If a financial expert isn’t on hand, then you’ll certainly have to learn such adjustments by trial-and-error. Quite often, the true cost of doing business isn’t known until the business is done, and then reviewed. Wait though – do you review how much profit you make (that’s if you did in fact make profit) after every gig? I guess not – because you’re chasing the next gig! So the learning process of setting price against numerous factors can be haphazard and far from even a rough science.

This is confirmed bu Mechele Pellebon at FreelanceVanity.com who described this quandry as one of the biggest issues for freelancer:

It takes even the most profitable freelancers a few months or even years to get into the rhythm of setting their prices properly.

But learn you must… or you will price yourself out of the market, or reduce (or even totally lose) your profit.

Learning is made easier, for example, if you work for a small number of clients. Over time, you learn about their behaviors, such as their management rigor, how they make decisions (and stick to them) or their social/political philosophies. Eventually, you strike on an acceptable configuration of price adjustments that match your factors, and you then only need to adjust one or two as your relationship develops or the importance of each factor changes.

If you’re setting a price for a brand-new customer, what then? You have to give it your best guess and suffer any financial losses, or damage to your integrity, whilst you learn about them, that’s what!

Under-pricing yourself is a costly mistake. Chris Garrett claimed that this was his number-one gaffe !

Many freelancers find this a gloomy prospect. I know I do.

So does Mr X (that’s not his real name… obviously, but Mr X chooses to remain anonymous). Mr X is a freelancer in Palm Springs who helps companies renegotiate commercial property leases. Therefore, he works with many customers as there are long delays between repeat custom. During the last 5 years Mr X discovered, much to his peril, that several customers required much more effort than others. Bound by a contract, Mr X experienced cashflow problems whilst customers delayed decision-making and requested further negotiation, before he received payment. Forced to finance his business through loans, Mr X has suffered terrible losses (over $55,000).

What Mr X desires is a structured method to set prices against risk factors. He doesn’t have the option of learning about the idiosyncrasies of each customer to set the price accordingly.

In general, freelancers need a complete and structured method which accounts for any number of factors resulting in a way of setting competitive and profitable prices.

The thing is, traditional processes around negotiating pricing lacks a finite framework (i.e. step A, step B, and then step C and Hey Presto! You have a price!). Telephone calls can be exchanged and contracts can be vetted, however while these may show that buyer and seller have established a rate - they do not lead the parties down an equitable path to establishing that rate. Having a point-by-point framework for price negotiation could create equity in the process and deliver a win-win outcome to both parties - or what might feel like one anyway (see my thoughts on ‘win-win’ negotiation here ). The best outcome is that you’re not screwed over, by your customer or by your own efforts.

When I heard Mr X’s story, I searched for such tools… I found only one: FactorHub .

FactorHub claims to provide tools and techniques for determining what price you should charge based on a series of factors that you determine. This tool can be applied consistently over any business request that might affect your costs and subsequently your pricing.

When you use FactorHub, you tell it what factors are important, and how important, and it tells you your ideal price to charge. When I ran through several evaluations I could see the effect of different factors on the price I was recommended. These numbers weren’t plucked out of the air though. This is where the power of FactorHub comes in…

The best thing about FactorHub is that it consolidates the experiences of a whole community of freelancers to weight the effect of factors to produce a recommended price. This means that as a user of FactorHub, you’re enjoying the benefit of experience from a plethora of your freelancing peers.

This is the way it works. Freelancers using FactorHub can choose to share their actual pricing adjustments with the community who use a common ‘template’ of factors – these adjustments are aggregated and levelled to produce a ‘standard’ recommended adjustment which can be used by any other freelancer using that template. By using the standard, you’re adjusting your price towards the industry norm – the norm being all other gigs where those factors have relevance.

FactorHub is a powerful tool for ensuring that all the relevant factors are accounted for and have an influence on how we set price, so it solves the problem! (I must tell Mr X…)

I can’t find any competitors to FactorHub on the market, so there is nothing to compare it to (well, except to the pain of learning how to factor manually, that is). This makes it a unique proposition. Well done to the guys at FactorHub!

Cut out that painful and expensive process of setting prices using Trial-and-Error. Leverage the experiences of your peer-group - FactorHub .

Keep your eyes peeled - next time I will be looking more at factoring and FactorHub as I learn more about how it works, and hopefully I will land an interview with one of the guys there too! To find out when I publish this article, subscribe to my RSS Feed !

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

So is economic recession. There are many common characteristics between recession in the economy and the natural world, yet an economic downturn seems to come as a surprize and unprepared for. Why?

Nature - people and wildlife - has found rehearsed strategies in order to survive:

• They use their resources sparingly.
• They may migrate to regions which have more abundance. The annual migration of the wildebeest in Africa is one of best known examples of this.
• They understand and anticipate the side effects. These may range from an increase in disease or plagues of mosquitoes and locusts, to a rise in food prices (exacerbating the situation) and on to land degradation, bush fires and ultimately, social conflict and widespread death and destruction.
• They adapt, as best they can, to their new, temporary environment.
• They take advantage of unexpected opportunities – crocodiles and lions wait in ambush for the migrating wildebeest.
• Outside agencies attempt to alleviate the problems or at least, reduce the effects – Aid Agencies and other NGOs offer food and shelter in the worst effected regions.

As economic recession continues, are there lessons that we, in the business world, can learn from the natural world? Let’s take another look at the above strategies and see how they can be applied to the business environment…

• They use their resources sparingly – This lesson has obviously been learned by most of us. Spending is down (which is, of course, deepening the recession), many people are overpaying their mortgages every month and credit card debt is being paid off faster than before. ‘Eating In’ is the new ‘Going Out’ and the large supermarkets and take away chains are the main beneficiaries. In the workplace, budgets are being cut and we are all asked to ‘do more with less’.
• They may migrate to regions which have more abundance – Many people will look around for a new job, either at home or abroad. Whilst vacancies are more limited at the moment, those of us working in IT with strong transferable skills are better placed than most to take advantage of new opportunities.
• They understand and anticipate the side effects – The side effects, of course, include redundancies, and longer working hours for those who survive the cull. Personal relationships may suffer as a result of this and you must recognize if this is becoming an issue in your own relationships, both at work and (more importantly) at home.
• They adapt, as best they can, to their new, temporary environment – this point is absolutely key to your survival during this recession. Here are some thoughts for your consideration:
  1. Network - Make sure you get to know as many managers as possible in your organisation and make sure they know who you are. This means getting outside of the IT department!
  2. Operate above your payscale - Offer suggestions to your boss, offer to make presentations at departmental meetings. Take the initiative and start (or carry on) doing things that your boss should be doing but for which you can take responsibility.
  3. Make yourself indispensable - Help your line manager as much as you can. If you’ve moved around in the IT department, help those who are currently working in an area where you’ve worked previously (without annoying them, of course). If you know people in other departments of the organisation, spend time with them and understand their issues – can the IT department help them to overcome these?
  4. Go the extra mile - If your line manager asks you to help him/her prepare for a board meeting, for example, go the extra mile and prepare some presentation slides too. They may not be the finished article but it’s much easier to finesse something that already exists than to start with a blank piece of paper.
  5. Socialize with your colleagues - Integrate with your colleagues. Go for a drink after work. Get involved in societies and clubs. You never know who you might meet and the deeper you dig yourself into the fabric of the organization, the more difficult it becomes to do without you.
• They take advantage of unexpected opportunities – If your line manager leaves, for whatever reason, you may find yourself running the team in a ‘holding capacity’. Take the initiative and do more than just ‘hold the fort’. Make your own decisions and add your own stamp to the team. In times of recession, it is more likely that you will be offered the job permanently, if you show promise, rather than recruiting externally. Budget cuts may also offer opportunities for you to develop skills which are currently under-utilized. Perhaps you know some html or java but don’t use it at work because web development is outsourced. Offer to help with support and development – you never know where it may lead.
• Outside agencies attempt to alleviate the problems or at least, reduce the effects – In the business world, the government(s) is responsible for tackling the recession. They do this in a number of ways. Currently, interest rates are extremely low. If you have a mortgage that’s not on a fixed rate, overpay your monthly payments. You will be pleasantly surprized how this affects the length of your mortgage term. If you are on a fixed rate mortgage, check out how much you will pay in redemption fees to move to a Tracker mortgage. This may be worth your while.
  And haggle! If you’re buying something over and above the usual weekly shopping, ask for a deal. You’ll often get something off the price – it all helps!

There are many survival lessons to be learned from the natural world and a whole lot more that apply in our world. The most important lesson of all is that in YOUR life, it’s up to YOU – Nobody’s going to do it for you!

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

I just love it when I see repeat commentators (the guys listed on the top commentator leaderboard - keep it up!), and I am also overjoyed to see new commentators coming in and sharing their views and asking questions.

Comments make this blog. I just wanted to show my appreciation!

Simon

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

The explosive use of LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace has urged some companies to reevaluate their electronic-use policies. Some organizations have banned social-networking tools completely over concerns about a drop in productivity as well as data-security.

Has this happened in your workplace?

Let’s be honest, there is something inherently addictive about social-networking. CIO.COM report that (according to IT Director of Lee Michaels Fine Jewelry, Mark Lappin) some employees were spending 4-5 hours per day on it - quite possibly an exaggerated or worse-case claim, but I believe it possible. Even if it’s a half or quarter of that, this still creates a massive drag on an organization’s output.

Even if its use was kept to a minimum, it still presents a potential data-security risk. Hackers have refocused their energies toward spreading their crap across these services, resulting in compromized workstations and networks. Also reported on CIO.COM, David Lavenda, (a vice president at WorkLight) claims that email is in a steady state in the context of hacking, but social-networking tools present real opportunities to the villains out there, assumingly because the maturity of hack-prevention tools is low.

This presents a dilemma for CIOs and employees. How do organizations allow their employees to connect and communicate for genuine business purposes without opening the floodgates to loafing and abuse, securely?

One answer is a solution that each and every one of us takes responsibility for. That is, we use these tools responsibly: we limit our use to genuine business activities, including building relationships, and ensure that we comply with acceptable use policies as well as employ savvy practices to avoid malware penetration. Easier said than done. But if we take that responsibility seriously then we create the best opportunity to avoid a management backlash of shutting these tools down.

I have encouraged the adoption of these tools many times over. They enable genuine business advantage as well as for personal benefit (use for job-hunting), yet I have to encourage responsible use as we all do.

If we don’t, then it will be taken away!

So do you web-two-o too much? And more importantly, would your boss agree?

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

LinkedIn is the de facto business networking tool. Twitter is emerging as a prominent business networking tool, but right now it doesn’t come close to LinkedIn’s content and context richness.

Do you LinkedIn? I suspect you probably do.

If you’ve been using it for a while and your profile is complete, then you have probably been invited by people to connect. At first, the novelty is exciting and (if you’re like me) you accept all offers to connect. Thing is, LinkedIn are clamping down on such frivolous behavior. We need to be more selective.

So if potential connections are becoming more choosy, how do you stand out to make sure your invitation is accepted? You have One Opportunity - that’s all.

If you get just one shot at attracting a hot connection, then you probably shouldn’t waste it.

You might never get another opportunity to connect with this person again. If your motivation to connect is to create a business opportunity, or if you’re job-seeking, or maybe you want to tempt them to join your organization then this could be a costly mistake.

Ask yourself this: Do you use the boiler-plate invitation to connect, or do you tailor it to your invited connection?

Dave Crain is asking this question, and he has the answer on how to stand out. He presents an opportunity that costs you nothing but a few moments to attract the attention of choosy connections.

You can read Dave’s article right here. Why not make Dave’s day and leave a comment?

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Recession and economic turblulence is forcing many IT professionals to reconsider their future. Many are turning to freelancing as a way of regaining control of their future and putting some certainty back into their lives. It’s a simple principle of being ones own boss, and being in control of decisions and destiny.

The great thing about becoming a freelancer is that YOU choose what work you undertake, generally. Notwithstanding periods where work dries up, a freelancer has a choice of which projects they undertake. Sometimes this choice is driven purely by financial benefits, but it’s also commonly driven by location, technology and (emerging as a important factor) the philosophies of customers.

(I will soon be publishing an article on factoring, and why it is becoming even more important in customer engagement and pricing - subscribe to my RSS Feed to be alerted when…)

Your First Big Challenge: Getting Started

The benefits of freelancing are tremendous, but how do you get to the point to actually begin realizing those benefits?

Most freelancers that ‘fail’ do so because they don’t get started properly. Thing is - you gotta walk before you can run. The nature of freelancing is that it’s you - just you - so who is going to support you in getting started? It’s rare you find a freelancer who bought an operating business off the shelf. Freelancers must go through the pain of starting up.

Getting started is a multi-dimensional problem…

• You have to create a business
• You have to get a place to work
• You need equipment
• You need to have a proposition that potential customers buy in to
• You need to market yourself
• You have admin to do
• You need to deliver
• You need to get paid to generate cashflow
• You need to build relationships with customers and suppliers

The list goes on! And you have to do these things quickly, or your business won’t get off the ground.

Many freelancers just start and learn how to do these things. But this type of freelancer is most likely to end up in the ‘failure’ bracket. To be frank, a freelancer needs all the help and guidance they need to avoid failure, missed opportunities and wasted effort.

This is where ‘How To Be A Rockstar Freelancer’ comes in…

I have chosen to promote this book for one big reason - it is the best example of a guide book to get started in the market.

This book takes a would-be freelancer on a journey from concept to benefit realization. It shares all the steps you need to take to create a profitable operation, and better still, alerts you to the pitfalls to avoid.

The book tells the would-be freelancer how to choose the most effective freelancing path (part-time, home-based, full-time etc). Most people have a set image of a freelancer, and this book offers you alternatives to suit your situation. It also discusses finances, accounting, company creation and business planning.

Further chapters take you right through branding, your working day, finding projects, pitching to clients, referrals, project management, pricing, project delivery, client management, invoicing/receipting, marketing and business growth.

Everything you need. No gaps!

I wish this book was available when I started out. I could have saved so much time, money and effort (and a few embarrassments too!)

Best of all, this book costs just $29. That’s 29 bucks against the costs of failure and lost opportunity. That’s 29 bucks that buys you confidence and assurance. With that perspective, all would-be freelancers must buy this book. Heck, your competition has.

And get this - if you don’t like it, ask for your money back. It comes with a cast-iron guarantee that if it doesn’t add value, then you don’t pay for it. I’ll bet the 29 bucks is repaid a thousand times over, if not more.

If you’re a would-be freelancer chomping at the bit to get going, Buy This Book Today!

Click here to make this wise purchase.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

I recently wrote a piece on how to create a high impact on your customers by managing their expectations properly when doing business with them over a distance. If you didn’t see it, then you can read it right here: Freelancers: Get Client Wow-Factor By Managing Expectations.

Perfecting a *sustainable* and *repeatable* way of communicating with all your clients takes time, practice, and learning. It’s a long road, but well worth the effort. Once you’ve perfected it, it becomes easy and feels effortless, allowing you to be smug whilst all your freelancer friends still struggle to keep their clients uptodate!

Let me point you to a great article on the FreelanceFolder.com website - How To Successfully Work With People Long Distance, which discusses the intricacies of non-verbal communication as it relates to business at distance. Some great tips there!

It is because of these intricacies that I strongly believe in choosing the right tools to reduce the effect of lost communication. Choose the right tool for the right job! This is why web-based project-management tools work very well as they enable you to be very clear and specific about your project-based communication. Need to provide support to your client once you’ve gone live? Then choose a support ticket systems to automate your communication processes where appropriate!

There is always a tool out there to help you communicating with your customer, and manage their expectations effectively.

The challenge for freelancers is to find the best tool for the job. There are often countless options, so how do you know which to choose from? In my experience, trials are the most effective. Good news: A trial if often free (the software vendors want you to take a trial)! What I do is be explicit with my customers that I am trialing a new piece of kit - I bring them in on it. They’re often glad of it because they’re learning about new software too. Why I like to do this is if the tool doesn’t work out, we can agree to can it quickly with no loss of face. The aim is to improve our business relationship, and they know that, so being realistic and nipping it in the bud quickly only demonstrates that I have our mutual interests in mind. So don’t be afraid to try something, and then bin it if you and your customer both feel it’s adding no value.

Do you want to share your experiences of using tools to manage long-distance customers? Do you know of any new or unusual tools? Then please share them by leaving a comment!

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

This is a question asked by many IT Professionals right now. Maybe you’ve read the signs that layoffs are ahead, or you’re frustrated in your current role. You could even be considering joining the ranks of freelancers. It’s a risky move to leave a paid job. Especially if setting up by yourself.

It’s important that we understand the risk factors and take these into consideration when preparing yourself to quit.

Enter Mark McClure ’s recent post on this very subject. I love Mark’s writing because he says it as it is. No fluff. But with a bit of humor thrown in.

Mark isn’t advising against quitting your job, but he does highlight the risks associated with it. It’s education which adds to the quality of such an important decision. In his post he shares a great free resource that I strongly suggest you read if you’re thinking about quitting. You won’t regret it!

Read Mark’s post ‘Drinking The Quit Your Job Kool-Aid ‘ now.

Read my review of Mark’s ‘IT Career Engineer‘ too…

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

So I hope you’ve been able to read the book through, and…

Can I Get Your Feedback on This Book?

Please tell me what you think about this book. Maybe you could answer one of these questions:

• What did you like about the book?
• What did you dislike about the book?
• What changes would you make to this book?

I’m all for transparency! Please leave your thoughts by commenting against this post.

Thanks!

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

So much so that when I revise my book ‘The 10 Habits of Highly Effective IT Professionals’ (if you haven’t got your copy yet, then download it for free by entering your name and primary email into the form on the right) I will include it.

What he showed me was something simple, but very effective.

Mark Jacques has a ’swipe file’ of information he collects and uses on a day-to-day basis. During any technical conversation, he can choose to pull out a page from his file to contribute to the conversation. It saves a lot of time and effort and it immediately helps the discussion get to the point and move on. Sounds too simple, but it blew my mind on how effective it is.

He collects pages from trade magazines (such as CIO, Information Age, etc), prints from web articles and just as importantly, scraps of paper that contain his own notes and data that he has generated himself.

Creating an Information Catalog is something I strongly suggest, and this is a real-time extension of that. Mark carries uptodate slices of information relating to current projects and initiatives, and also any ideas he is working on, as well as other snippets on current affairs in the technology space.

We all need a swipe file of some kind. We waste so much time re-iterating technical information and sharing knowledge from scratch, time which could  be best used working on problems or on technical delivery - this tactic solves this problem.

In my opinion, the most powerful aspect of Mark’s technique is that he carries his own notes around with him and is able to lay his hand on them at any point during a conversation. Over the years in IT, I have found that I have needed to explain a technology’s design/architecture or to demonstrate the idea/concept behind something - each time I re-draw it, sometimes missing something out or totally screwing up the drawing. I hadn’t figured that once I have struck upon a way of articulating something, I should re-use it over and over again.

This isn’t the same as formal technical documentation. The kind of drawings I am thinking about are the ones we’re asking to show non-technical people to help them understand why they need to allow time, fund something, or secure resources. They’re the kind of drawings you write on a whiteboard for executives or colleagues in Finance.

There is a much longer term benefit to this tactic Mark found. When he prepares documents this way and has them on hand, he is much more confident about discussing the subject. In turn, this makes him appear more impressive (as I found) and the impact he had on the listener is much greater, which increases his authority and trust placed on him. Because each presentation of the subjects are essentially well-practiced and highly-tuned. (I did note that when I asked Mark about some details on the drawings, he filled in more detail and can now use it again should he need to.)

How Do You Get Your Swipe-File?

Easy. It starts with a cardboard folder and a ring-bound notebook.

Many people use fully-bound books during their day-to-day activities, but tearing these pages out is a risky move (I’ve tried it, and torn right through my work!). Avoid these kinds of books.

When you’re drawing a design or an idea, write it in your book as you normally would. Review it afterwards and see if there are ways it could be presented better. Redraw it on a fresh page, and tear it out an place it in your folder.

If you read industry magazines, tear out articles or even ads for products that are relevant to your current projects and place them in the folder.

Each week, fortnight or month (depending on how often your environment changes), empty your folder and put back only the items that are currently relevant, and discard the rest (although I am a little bit anal and place those pages in an archive folder for future reference!). The point is, your swipe file should be lite and current, and most of all, easy to search and retrieve. If it’s full of crap, then you will get frustrated with it.

This is such a simple technique, but so effective it was worthy of an article.

For those of you who are digital-only (I still haven’t made that jump yet) then there is a technology which I think is brill - Evernote (the winner of my readers ‘Free Tools’ contest last year). This is an online swipe-file in essence. It enables you to record snippets of almost any digital content - text, images, audio, etc. and retrieve them using multiple client types.

Evernote has a great feature that might just push me over the digital precipice - text recognition. Say you scrawl a diagram on a napkin (I like to call these ‘napkinagrams’) you’d like to reference in the digital world. Take a picture of the napkinagram using your blackberry/iPhone’s camera, and then reference it in Evernote. Hey presto, you can search the text on your napkinagram like you will using any other content. Marvellous!

You can download an Evernote client for Windows/Mac/iPhone/cellphone or just use the web client from the Evernote website.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Get this - we’re much more likely to hold ourselves back because of excuses rather than genuine reasons. We use excuses to rationalize a fear or worry. Excuses are a convenient ‘truth’ we invent to avoid the perceived pain of changing.

How we generate excuses is typically dependent on our personality and the wiring in our head. There are two dichotomies of behavior that I think are especially relevant:

• There are people whose default response to a situation is to take full responsibility for it. I.e. they blame themselves. They might say “I’m not good enough” or “I haven’t got the money to do that”
• There are people whose default response to a situation is to take no responsibility for it. I.e. they blame other people. They might say “I won’t get the support from X” or “They want me to fail”

When we’re faced with a challenge we perceive to be painful, we might generate an excuse using our default response as above and rationalize it as a reason not to face the challenge. Our excuses hold us back, but we find comfort in our excuses.

I tend to take personal responsibility. When I make an excuse, I believe that I am deficient in something. I beat myself up, and put myself down. A close personal friend does the opposite - he blames to world and his dog for being held back. What he hasn’t learned yet (despite me sharing my opinion about it) that he is stifling himself.

How about you?

Do you recognize which of the dichotomies you fit? If not, don’t be surprised at first - the process of identifying how you respond can be painful itself. It requires some soul-searching and self-enlightenment.

But here is a simple way of finding out. You need some paper, a pencil, and a friend.

Start writing on the paper the outcomes you want to achieve, or the changes you want to make. Write them down as you think them so let it flow. Second step is to write down why you think you’re being held back - what are the reasons (rational or irrational) that success isn’t happening for you? Third step is to talk them through with a friend and get their opinion on the reasons. Make sure it’s a honest opinion!

So long as you have picked a good friend, this process will reveal to you whether you tend to take more responsibility for being held back than you should be doing, or the opposite.

Guess what - you will also find this process helpful in spotting which excuses can be wiped away (with some counselling from yourself, friends or colleagues), and which ones need more work. Your goal must be to remove all excuses and leave yourself with a list of genuine reasons - which become the real challenge!

These reasons are what hold you back, in reality.

Stay tuned (as I will soon be sharing some tips on how to overcome your obstacles) by subscribing to my RSS Feed

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Worry is like prayer in reverse - Michael Angier

Society programs us to worry. It’s the reason why we buy unecessary insurance. How often, as a kid, did you hear something like “you’d better start worrying about your future”? We’ve developed an anxiety culture, partly because it shifts said insurance and the health-and-safety industry. The recession that started in 2008 is as much as a perception fuelled by media as it is an economic reality.

According to Wikipedia:

Worry is an emotion in which a person feels anxious or concerned about a real or imagined issue, ranging from personal issues such as health or finances to broader issues such as environmental pollution and social or technological change. Most people experience short-lived episodes of worry in their lives without incident; indeed, a moderate amount of worrying may even have positive effects, if it prompts people to take precautions (e.g., fastening their seat belt or buying fire insurance) or avoid risky behaviours (e.g., promiscuous sexual relations or cliff diving).

Excessive worry is the main component of Generalized anxiety disorder.

My mom and other habitual worriers don’t develop and grow because of it, sadly enough. Worry is a reason not to do something, take risks, or try new experiences. When we worry, we close in and guard ourselves. Get this though - most worry is totally irrational, and has a far worse effect than if the things we worry about actually manifested.

Ask yourself this: What would happen if you lost that job, really? Is the effect of the worry causing you more damage than you would experience losing the job? (Adapt the question to what you’re worrying about!)

A chip off the old block

Coming from worrying stock, I used to be generally anxious. I used to worry about stuff - stuff that I can’t actually remember now. It’s interesting that I can think back and easily recall the pain of worrying but not the things I actually used to worry about. It proves my point.

The peak of my worrying days was about 10 years ago when the ‘dotcom bubble’ began to burst. I was surrounded by the threat of layoffs, and the company I worked in merged with another organization, so the E-Commerce Practice I had built up began to be broken up and fed into an existing structure, and my position was under threat. I worried like hell. I worried to the point that I verged on a total nervous breakdown. I can distinctly remember the eye-twitching, panic attacks and visiting the doctor about my blood-pressure. I nearly split with my girlfriend who is now my lovely wife. It was that serious. I will never forget those days, and the effect of thunderous worry.

Enlightenment

I don’t worry any more (well, I don’t to the point I would say I am a worrier) but this didn’t happen overnight. Far from it. But after the episode I described above, I decided to learn more about worry and do something about it.

This is what I did about it.

I accepted the worst. Whenever the emotions of worry emerged, I would just accept that the thing I worried about had actually happened. How I did this was to play the situation through in my head, and visualize the disasterous outcome. I subjected myself to a shock, in essence.

Once the shock subsided, my response followed. In almost all cases, my response was an action to cope with the disaster, or resolve it, or identify what could have been done to prevent it.

Is this a waste of time and energy…?

… asked by a student of one of my course once. No! Most definitely not. Here’s why I have strong feelings about that:

• When we accept the disaster before it happens, we take the biggest blow in a safe and controlled environment.
• Once we’re over the shock, we plough energy into finding solutions to the problem.
• Moreover, we often find ways of preventing the disaster happening at all and put them into action.
• Such mental gymnastics builds personal adaptability and resilience. It contributes to our personal growth and strengths.
• Best of all: should the disaster actually happen, we know what to do.

Practice in this tactic has meant I have built up serious resilience in the face of adversity. To the point that I am now considered as working best in a crisis. It is true that during crises in IT matters, I am invited to join the crisis team. I’ve turned worrying into an artform and a science, and certainly to my advantage.

Stop Worrying and Start Living

Back in 2004, I picked up a well-thumbed paperback by some guy I hadn’t heard about before - Dale Carnegie. What I learned was that Carnegie was a best-selling and prize-winning author back in the first half of the twentieth century. What’s amazing is that all his material now is still fresh and highly relevant. Sure, if you don’t read an adapted version of his book, you will experience some old-fashioned language, references to Christianity and the masculine text, but what the context and virtues are as current as any other book you will pick up from the bookstore.

In this book, Carnegie talks about some of the dire personal consequences (using many real-life examples) and how to free yourself from worry through straightforward practice. What I like the most about this book is it isn’t a science journal - the solutions are simple and articulated as thought exercises in the simplest form.

This book is a must read if you’re a worried now or are a worrier in general. I can’t believe it’s only $11.99 in paperback and only $7.99 if you one of those Kindle devices. (Get a used copy, like I did, for less than 6 bucks too!)

Get this book too!

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (Paperback)
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (Kindle)

Summary

Worrying is a natural response to uncertainty, but it’s a pain in the butt when it gets in the way of solving problems and personal development. I regret my worrying days. I was lucky though: I saw the light and pulled myself out (I’m still working on my mom!). It started with accepting the worst.

I have become so adept at dealing with stressful situations that I have become a specialist in dealing with crises. I don’t worry!

(I do wish I had read How to Stop Worrying and Start Living earlier in my life though, but I’m not worried about it )

Here’s another article that you will find useful:
5 steps to control your worry (How to stop worrying yourself to death)

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

This is a question I am asked a lot by the people I coach. It seems that confidence in the economy has hit such depths that some folks are wondering if there is any point in planning their future, but rather leave it to chance and take what comes.

Pretty grim, huh?

I can understand the lack of faith in the future, especially when folks work their butt off by developing skills for the IT industry which are deeply technical and specialized. People plough a lot of their time and money into preparing for, and starting, an IT career, and it takes just as much effort in maintaining it. Only for the economy to create downward pressure on business to lay these people off, or put their career progression on hold. Total bummer, when you look at it like that.

Chris Jones is a 23 year-old infrastructure engineer and a friend of mine. He went to University in Reading, England, and aced his degree in Computer Science. That’s four years and over $15,000 out of his pocket. He then spent another 12 months on technical courses learning advanced subjects about server and network infrastructure – another $25,000 out of his pocket (actually, his parents). He landed his first job in a Financial Services organization and set himself the goal of becoming a guru in VMWare as a specialism to lead to being a key influencer of virtualization architecture, design and buying decisions. He had totally committed to this goal. Then the recession took hold and his company began to shed jobs - Chris was one of the first to go because many infrastructure projects were put on the shelf.

Is Chris pissed off? Yes. Did he doubt that he can realize his goals? Yes.

After three months he remains in the line for jobs that don’t seem to come.  But after a month following Chris’s lay off, he realized he had a choice: give up on his goals, or reframe them. Sure, Chris didn’t have a job that would implicitly support his personal growth plans and the acquisition of skills and experience, but is it really then end of the line for them? At that point, Chris gave me a call and we looked at how he could still achieve his goals under new circumstances. And this is what he has to say about it:

Immediately after being laid off, I was in shock. The time, effort and money I had spent getting to that point in my early career was all gone, or so I thought at the time. Once the initial shock passed, I questioned whether having career goals was worth it. It was a sad time, I can tell you.

I am not naturally an optimist, but I am determined. A couple of week’s after getting the elbow I decided that I would find out if I can still achieve my goals without being in a steady job, as quite frankly, I don’t expect to be in one for a while.

This decision means I had to reconsider what my goals mean to me. Not being in a permanent job means I won’t be able to measure how much of a ‘guru’ I am by being the sole technical and acquisition lead on virtualization projects. I won’t be the ‘main man’. Instead, I am going to take a much more external view and measure that. In other words, I’ll achieve the same goal I committed by becoming a virtualization guru as recognized by the IT community and the authority I build using social networking and media. I’ll get there by taking on independent consulting work, hopefully gained by attracting buyers using a blog and writing articles that I will publish through Web2.0 based media outlets. The recognition I want will be for everyone to award and see!

I feel really excited about this now – I am still aiming to achieve what I desire but in a different way than I thought I would.

Chris used an interesting word towards the end of his quote – DESIRE. It is desire that I want to highlight as being the source of career goals – not money or a job title, or anything like that. We can all give ourselves a job title. Heck, we might even win the lottery. But if our goal is to achieve what we truly desire, then it doesn’t matter if we have to rethink how we get there. Our desire will maintain our motivation and create energy to achieve our goals that we didn’t think we had.

Steve Pavlina says it best. Here’s what he had to say about this when interviewed on the Zen Habits blog :

The way I see it, success isn’t about money or reputation or possessions or anything like that. Success is a decision. That’s all. Success is deciding what you really, truly want and committing yourself to getting it. If you’re making progress toward your desires, you’re successful.

Most people never get clear about what they want. Even if they set goals, the goals are often socially conditioned, not consciously chosen. Obviously you’re not going to succeed if you don’t listen to and accept your own desires, especially the desires that run afoul of social conventions. So not connecting with your true desires is mistake #1

That connection with desire is most important, and perhaps may explain if you’ve recently doubted yourself when facing your career goals. If you’ve been laid off, or if you’re worried about your job or how the economy effects it, then take a look at the career goals you’re aiming for and ask yourself if they connect with your desires. If you find yourself doubtful about your goals, or if you’re procrastinating instead of taking action, then it’s very likely that your goals don’t connect with your desires.

How Do You Connect Your Goals To Your Desires?

Doing this is as simple as your ability to listen to your inner voices allows. Creating goals that connect to desire stems from listening to the conversations inside your head, and then visualizing the outcome that solves the problems and opportunities. Career goals are no different from any other goals in this sense. You might find that visualizing your retirement day helps - what would you want to say about your career and its achievements as you receive your gold watch? You may even want to write your obituary, and describe what achievements you made there! These might sound goofy, but believe me they work when you want to focus your mind.

To summarize…

Career goals are as important as ever. A turbulent economy can mean well-laid plans are shot to pieces, but new plans can be made. The goals can remain the same, albeit achieved differently! If you can adapt and be flexible then goal-achievement is a journey without a map but instead a strong sense of direction. Connect your goals to your desires and you’ll find that your sense of direction is extremely strong and your motivation gets a boost!

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

I gave my ‘elevator pitch’ to her and answered the question, but it did spur me to review my reasons, because I felt the pitch wasn’t complete. I get much more out of my focus on performance now, since I wordsmithed my pitch in my head. My pitch was:

My performance is important to me because it’s how I deliver the best value to our organization and recieve rewards. When I acheive my performance targets, I know that I am contributing to the success of our organization in alignment to the organization’s corporate objectives.

So I reviewed my reasons and share them below:

1. I Achieve My Full Cash Bonus

I’ve put the financial reason first, because that’s what most people want to hear! By achieving my desired performance levels and delivering my objectives (well, I strive to totally ACE them) I meet the criteria set by my organization to receive my full financial incentives.

In most organizations, there is a performance-related financial incentive: often annual bonus (or Short Term Incentive Plan, or STIP), but frequently on salary, too. Other longer-term incentives (often called a Medium Term Incentive Plan, or MTIP) are contingent on sustained achievement of personal performance targets.

2. Demonstrable Track-Record of Achievements

When I persistently achieve my performance targets, I am building up a track record of high achievement which is referrable during performance appraisals and application for promotions. It’s also a valuable asset when seeking a good reference.

It’s not just what is on paper or my record on the HR system - in most organizations, the results of performance appraisals and our track-records are reviewed by our manager with their peer group (often to ensure fairness is applied across the organization), so it works as an excellent profile-builder in senior management tiers.

In addition, possessing a documented history of your achievements (recorded with their targets/success criteria and how they were measured) can be fed into your resume. Resumes work best when they talk about quantifiable achievements, rather than responsibilities or tasks.

3. Corporate Responsibility

When we’re set objectives and goals, it’s generally because the organization as a whole requires them to meet it’s objectives (generally set by stakeholders). If we fail, the organization will fail unless remedial action is taken - normally by spending money, or diverting resources, or taking extra risk.

Therefore we have a huge responsibility (no matter what level we are at in the organization) to achieve our objectives and performance targets.

As IT people, we are at the helm of a massive investment. We’re here to make computers do lots of valuable work. So if those computers are not operated, configured or designed properly, the organization will fail to meet it’s objectives. And fail big time. So whether you’re involved in the design, build, configuration, operation or management of IT equipment your actions and decisions (or lack of them) can have a massive effect on your organization. This is why our performance is important.

4. My Relationship With My Boss

I do my job to make my boss successful. In turn, my boss’s job is to make his boss successful. And so on. So when I achieve my objectives, I am helping my boss achieve his. This is good for our working relationship - it fosters trust and respect between us.

Goal-alignment also encourages a stronger relationship between us - when our goals are aligned we’re both working to the same objective, which creates co-dependence and the need to work closer together. I make a specific point of ensuring that the objectives of my boss are reflected in my own, and make corrections if they’re not.

Want to know what happens when goals aren’t aligned? 5 Reasons Why Your Boss Hates You.

5. I Am A Role-Model In My Organization

This isn’t a statement from a big-head (is it?) but all organizations need role-models and heros to show how it should be done. You will find role-models right the way through your organization if you look for them, and they’re not always in the obvious places.

It’s important for our colleagues to not just understand the theory of their work, but also see how an expert does it. By focusing on my performance I give others an example of how the work should be done, allowing them to emulate me if they choose to. Of course, I have my own ’style’ - not everyone agrees with the way I do things - but that’s OK, they don’t have to see me as a role-model.

Anyone can be a Role-Model. It’s not an exclusive right of senior management and leaders. There is a responsibility that comes with the role; a role-model has influence over those people who follow him or her. It’s this aspect of being a role-model that I enjoy the most - it keeps me honest, and sharp. If my actions and behaviors don’t just have an effect on my own performance, but also that of others, I am forced to be more deliberate, less irrational and very much more considerate than if I was a sole-operator.

6. I Become An Expert At Goal-Setting and Goal-Achievement

I don’t underestimate the value of being a seasoned expert at goal-setting and goal-achievement. It’s a meta-skill I’ve developed through constant practise. By itself it means nothing - it won’t pay the bills - but when I apply these skills to my objectives I am much more likely to ACE them.

When I am set new objectives and performance targets, I go about breaking them up into short-term goals (weekly), measuring results, and learning from them. It’s a pattern I evolve and iterate over. You can do the same, it doesn’t take special knowledge or skills to start - just begin and continue and your skill will develop over time.

7. Motivation And Confidence

A direct result of reason #6 is increased motivation and confidence. Achievement feels good, and in turn it gives me extra motivation and confidence to achieve the next goals and targets. Success breeds success! It becomes an ever-increasing circle of growth.

Don’t believe me? Well set yourself a small goal (no matter how small), and achieve it - just go for it. How do you feel afterwards? It feels good right? Now set yourself a slightly more challenging goal, and achieve that. How do you feel now? I expect you feel even better, and motivated. This is the effect I am talking about. Now scale this up towards your annual objectives… it’s no different in its application.

So What Is My Elevator Pitch Now?

The essence of an elevator pitch is that is can be given in 30 seconds or less, so how do I boil down these reasons to just a few words? I’ve given it my best shot…. see what you think!

My performance is important to me because it increases my influence, it enables me to achieve my career and financial goals, it improves my relationship with my boss and my team, it also increases my competence in achieving new objectives, and in turn it enhances my confidence and motivation to do it all again.

Bit wordy? Fluffy? Or spot on? What is your response to this elevator pitch?

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

No sets a boundary. And once you know why your clients says No to your proposal, you have a foundation to work off. Cutting price is not always the best approach.

In this article, I will give you a serious edge when negotiating by sharing a few psychological techniques. These techniques rely on typical human behaviors. Use them to avoid a sterile approach to negotiating and give yourself an upper hand.

The fact is that most people like to win, and win for a clear and obvious reason. Negotiators don’t always strive for the outcome they have been given as an objective – a deeper psychological imperative is to come out on top on a number of levels, and the moral high ground is one of them, as is a position of superiority. It’s not just about winning the best deal, it’s about winning the personality game. If you want to come out as the best personality, then forget this next section as your emotions will get the better of you. To win in a negotiation, you have to put emotions aside.

The Un-comfort Zone

Why does the outbreak of tears turn a row into a reconciliation? What effect does pity have on an outcome? The answer is that they create an uncomfortable situation. Human beings like their comfort zones. And they do whatever it takes to avoid stepping out of it. This is a fact of human behavior that you can use to your advantage.

It’s like this: in any negotiation, who will most likely win – the guy in the sharp-suit and perfect hair, manicured nails, with a 100-page presentation and $800 pen, or the guy who bumbles, stumbles on words, with fingernails like a garden laborer and appears fragile?

If you guessed the first guy, then think again. The second guy will win most negotiations.

Why? It’s about the comfort zone. The first guy feels comfortable. The outward display of rigor and splendor says ‘I am comfortable, and I am safe’. He will probably be thinking that the other guy is not comfortable, and feel even safer in this belief. He probably thinks that he will win the negotiation because he looks more successful, he demonstrates the fruit of success in the sharp-suit and pen, and his well prepared presentation. He will feel in total control. He lacks belief that his opponent can put up a good fight, and any action on their part is random at best.

But the other guy… well do you remember the TV detective Columbo? He was a master of appearing inferior, and controllable to his adversaries. His dirty coat and beaten up car portrayed an image that encouraged criminals to feel no threat. He would appear to bumble around, turn away, and on his way out ask the killer question as if it was an after-thought. The criminal is totally unprepared for it.

What happens is that the second guy above, and Columbo, both step into the un-comfort zone.

The un-comfort zone enables negotiators to lure their opponents into a false sense of security, and then use it. Let your more ‘comfortable’ opponent in a negotiation feel safe and secure in their belief that they have the upper hand.

OK, for those people that really do enjoy the morale high ground, this might seem a totally manipulative tactic, but I say this: in a negotiation, a win:win is a false prophecy.

Let me explain why. You’re a business-person. You have bills to pay, a living to enjoy and a future to invest in. So out of any deal, you need to make sure you get what you require to make it worthwhile and valuable to you. Anything less, you should walk away from it. It doesn’t matter if your client ‘wins’. All you should care about is a ‘win’ for you - that it meets your financial objectives and fits your personal values.

But if your definition of ‘win’ includes the psychological prizes of feeling superior and having the upper hand, then you’re trying to step into your comfort zone. This isn’t a win, it’s a hollow emotional victory. Winning this is like my son finding his lost ‘taggie-blankie’ that he won’t go to bed without.

But it’s highly likely that your client will be wanting their blankie too…. so let them have it whilst making sure you get the result *you* want. The cost of appearing goofy is nothing compared to your desired commercial outcome.

Don’t confuse my point about the pointless win:win. There is always the ‘virtuous spiral’ that comes with providing great service to a client who gives you valuable repeat business. It’s not about screwing people and damaging the chance of this outcome. It is about giving your clients the outcome they desire, and if a superiority complex is part of that outcome then hand it to them. Give them that (their taggie-blankie) and take the rest!

Negotiate with a clean slate

Another psychological tactic is to take everything said at face value and not build up expectations. This is perhaps better explained by an example I remember from two years back.

A friend was negotiating a price for a large piece of work with a high profile client. At the outset, the client said that the potential duration of the project would be 24 months, and would like my friends best price. So he set the price at a daily rate of $800 for that project, a discount of $300 off his usual daily rate. But what then happened is the client said that they would give him a 3-month contract at that rate! He hadn’t priced for a 3-month deal, he set the price for a 24-month deal. So he then was in a hell of a situation to negotiate the price upwards, which of course he couldn’t.

What happened was he had built up an expectation of a 2-year project and had priced on that expectation. He saw the dollar signs of a guaranteed 24-months work with no gaps and became over-excited. His positivity got the better of him. He fell into a classic trap. With hindsight, he should have negotiated the price against a contract rather than pure potential.

The flip-side to this is negativity. Some clients like to screw you on price (probably because they feel that they have achieved some emotional upper-hand, see the un-comfort zone). They start with a price that you can’t make profit off. So what do you do? Rookie negotiators create an expectation that unless they can come close to that price, they will lose the deal. So what they do is to find the lowest price that they can turn a tiny profit (or break even). The skilled freelance negotiator doesn’t fall for this. They don’t make such assumptions, and build such expectations. They return with a price that works for them and waits for a Yes, or No, and negotiates the factors (price, time, quantity, quality) from there.

The trick, in both situations, is to listen your inner-voice and check that you’re not making assumptions. In a negotiation, unless it’s explicitly stated, don’t factor it.

Summary

Negotiation can be a game of conniving and trickery. If you believe that your client wants to achieve a win:win then you’re opening up the serious possibility that you will be the loser. Don’t assume the worst though, in fact don’t assume anything. When negotiating, begin with knowing what you need to make the deal work and don’t compromise. Go for *your* win. Forget whether your clients wins or loses - that’s their concern. Equally, they will think the same of you.

Stay tuned for more freelancer negotiation tips. I’ll soon be discussing ‘factoring’ in more detail. Subscribe to my RSS feed to discover when I do!

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

The group shared their thoughts on how they have suffered from a bad relationships with their boss, and more to the point, how their relationships turned sour in the first place. It was such an interesting (and enlightening) conversation that I am sharing with you what I learned.

I distilled the conversations down to 5 reasons why your boss might hate you (although there maybe more, these are the biggies)

You are a Threat

If your boss believes you pose a threat to their job then they could turn nasty. If you walk around with a halo on your head (put there by your peers, or even your manager’s peers or superiors) then this could be perceived as dangerous to your boss.

This goes beyond the belief of your boss that you are after their job. By building up a strong profile inside your organization, which I fully recommend, it is likely that you a pedestal is also being built underneath you. If your profile creates support and sponsorship by senior members of your organization, then the likelihood of being knocked off is reduced, but there always remains the potential of being sniped off by a jealous boss.

If you suspect that this is the case, then you have a choice – continue as you are and live with the glory and the threat, or share your halo with your boss by ensuring that they always get 10% of the credit. (Number is arbitrary!). You do this by always mentioning their support and guidance as you achieve greatness.

You are Too Political

Politics is a banner of many behaviors, but roughly I am suggesting that your manager may get pissed off with you if you don’t consistently align with the truth and behave like ‘all things to all people’. Politics has its place, but over-emphasis on truth-economies can create distrust between you and your manager. Think about it: if they see you as a skilful player with your peers, then what do they read into your relationship?

If you’re in a politically charged environment (despite best will, this does happen) then it’s always best to disclose your political game plan with your boss. Even if they don’t play too, at least they know what you’re trying to achieve. Create a version of the truth that you both align to and will work together to achieve. Personally, I prefer work without politics, but if you must engage in politics then it’s important to have the support of your manager.

You are Not Political Enough

The flipside to the above, and probably a more likely situation. The higher you climb the pole, the greasier it gets.

Your manager may be playing many angles and operating in grey-areas to achieve an outcome… only for you to come along with an honest and transparent communication to destroy their game-plan.

My feelings towards this are clear – this is your manager’s fault and if they don’t involve you in the game (or at least tell you where the goal-posts are) then that is their problem. Nevertheless, your lack of awareness, or refusal to play, can build up bad feelings which are likely not to be expressed. Your boss’s hatred of you will seem irrational and may be sensed but not directly manifested.

There isn’t much you can do in these situations. Sometimes, a direct challenge might work but the same political behaviour will be applied in your manager’s response.

Lack of Rapport

Rapport is the X-factor in a relationship. When two people have rapport, they get along very well and the relationship flourishes. This happens when you and your manager perceive situations, and people, in similar ways and you make similar decisions and judgments based on that perception. Communication is effective. There is cohesion. It’s a foundation of trust.

What about the lack of rapport? The opposite of the above is true. Relationships die at the point of inception when two people can’t communicate effectively or agree on anything. When two people have two parametrically opposite personality traits, then building rapport is almost impossible. If you are a positive person, but your boss is negative, then it will be tough. If you are introvert, but your manager is extrovert, then it will be tough. Get the picture?

I don’t recommend trying to be a person you are not, in order to overcome this. You will come unstuck at some point, and to be frank, you will be miserable and stressed. The best way forward, when faced with this problem, is to just keep working at it. A lack of rapport will diminish over time providing that you and your manager are trying to achieve the same thing. It will be a bumpy road – so expect that – but eventually it will smooth out.

You Don’t Do What Your Manager Expects You To Do

Have you become upset when a mechanic didn’t fix the problem with your car? How about when your credit card company didn’t switch off payment protection, even when you ticked the option? It’s the same when you don’t do what you said you would do. Your manager gets pissed.

In modern organizations, strategic goals are cascaded from the most senior executives to junior employees. Your manager’s objectives are dependent on you achieving your objectives… and so on. If you don’t achieve your goals, your manager doesn’t too.

Worse still, your manager’s reputation can be drawn through the mud. Your failure could be a direct hit on your boss’s credibility. If this failure is caused by forgetfulness, or bad judgment, or incompetence then you can expect your manager to be upset with you. Persistent failure like this can lead to total hatred!

A more dangerous ground to tread on is when you’re going hell for leather for a goal that is different to the one your manager expects. It’s dangerous because the point of realization that your expectations are different is towards the end of the project or assignment. You might get into this situation if you and your boss haven’t built rapport.

This situation may be a deliberate coup by your manager if they’re playing political games or if they perceive you as a threat. Unless your objectives are clearly understood in the same way between you, your manager has a ticket to call foul at any point.

Truth is, managers rarely resort to these shenanigans, but much more common is a surprise moment a long way into an assignment when both of you realize your mistake of a difference in expectation. This is why it’s vital that you and your manager agree specifics, with little (or no) room for different interpretation. Especially so if your performance management, and your bonus, depends upon it.

I believe that total alignment of expectations is the only way to avoid pissing off your boss, and indeed achieving what they expect from you. I recommend you take a look at your current assignments now and check with your manager that your intended output is what he or she expects.

Want More Help?

I recently launched the ACE Your Performance Review Crash Course. This 5-day course takes you right through the journey of learning and preparation in order to ensure you can deliver your objectives, and achieve your full bonus.

Each day you receive a new Course Book which will share strategies and advice on how to do just that.

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©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

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©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Is it about bells and whistles?

Do you do it by providing comb-bound booklets?

Or is it about *really cool* slide masters when you do a powerpoint presentation?

Like Hell it is!

It’s something so simple to describe, you won’t believe it. I know because it works for me. I’ve also used this, and made my clients say Wow! too. If you want to make your clients say Wow! then all you have to do is…

….Get the Job Done, when you said it would be done, at cost, and at quality. And Manage Their Expectations.

So do I have a degree in the obvious?

Well not really. I’ll divulge another secret: most clients don’t really believe they will get all those things, but do say they expect them. So when they get it, they really do say Wow!

It’s about organization, and demonstrating it. It’s about creating confidence, and honoring it.

Being an organized IT freelancer goes hand in hand with being a successful freelancer. If you work for several clients or if you have many projects on the go, tools that help you manage your client communications and projects are as essential as your computer.

Not only do you need organization for your own sanity but for transparency to your customers and team members (if applicable) as well. There are some great tools that can help you whether it’s your job to manage large projects or whether your job is a specific piece in a freelance project.

First Things First: Your To Do List

Do you use a to-do list? If you don’t you might find that the busier you get the more you’re scrambling to get things done at the last minute. A day planner is an essential tool to help you and many technical people do suggest that even if you have an electronic handheld planner or use an online calendar that you still keep a paper record of what you need to do because sadly, technology is flawed and systems do go down. You need to know what has to get done on a daily basis and that can be as simple as a checklist. If you have a lot on the go, you’ll need more than that but a basic checklist is an essential tool for keeping you on target.

Why You Need Project Management Tools

Managing your own to do list is challenging at times but whether you’re a project manager, a key player in a big project or someone who finds that project management just happens to be a big portion of what they do, effective management of your freelance jobs will make a big impact on your stress levels and your success levels, too. Various tools can help you stay on top of your tasks and communicate with your customers and remote workgroups. It can also help you ensure you get paid properly and keep everything on target and on budget. Effective tools can help you both proactively and reactively so that you can handle any crisis that comes your way and circumvent crises before they threaten the success of your project.

Transparency

Showing a client that you’re organized and giving them the ability to track the progress of your project themselves works wonders for your relationship and reputation. Transparency can be very valuable with a freelance gig, especially when you are a remote freelancer and not working on site with a client. Some clients like to micromanage projects so their ability to quickly look up the status of something or have a quick web conference with you can save you time and hassle.

The Benefits of Web Based Project Management Tools

As much as you need tools for your client’s satisfaction you need tools to help you do your job more effectively as well. If you work as part of a team, web based tools offer a great deal of collaborative options and helpful features including offering you the ability to access the tools from anywhere. You can use web based tools for your own project management as well as for collaboration with clients and team members.

Another benefit of online tools is the ability to access them any time and anywhere. A lot of people don’t back up their work. Despite being IT professionals who know how catastrophic it can be to lose all your hard work, we get busy and we often forget or disasters happen suddenly. This is another reason why web-based tools work so well. While you should do your best to keep backup copies of everything it’s comforting to know that you can quickly access projects online from an internet café if some horrible fate suddenly befalls your desktop or laptop or Blackberry.

Managing Multiple Projects: The Basics

Whether you work for one client or for many, those managing several projects concurrently you should be able to give a precise status update to any of those clients at any given time. Your ability to do that largely rests on the types of tools you use in your everyday work. Even if you’re just managing a fraction of a larger project, knowing the basics of project management can help you deliver your portion in a way that demonstrates you are a key contributor and offer value to your clients. In essence, if you manage only a portion of a larger project your portion of that project should be managed like a project itself.

When managing a project you need to manage several factors:

• Schedule
• Delegation
• Budget

If you’re on a strict timeline you need to know if you’re on schedule at all times so you can act fast if you fall behind. Many factors can impact the timing and some of these are out of your control but your scope of the project has to be managed effectively otherwise you can impact other projects. If you have several people working on the project with you and everyone has various tasks they’re responsible for it’s important for the PM (project manager) and the end user to be able to get a bird’s eye view of where everyone is at, at all times.

While it’s useful to get text updates from everyone that tells you they’re on target sometimes you actually need to see this for yourself because the project can be like a house of cards so if just one small factor is out of alignment everything can come tumbling down. This will affect the schedule and the budget and potentially your reputation and ability to get future business from that client.

Project Management Tools

There are some fancy project management systems on the market that allow teams to collaborate and work with one another but if you’re freelancing you might not have the resources to use a high end expensive tool like some large corporations do. This doesn’t mean you can’t be organized. There are a lot of tools you can use to help you whether you pay for them or use them for free.

Let’s have a look at some options that are available individually for collaboration and for using on your own. You might find a great solution that encompasses many different areas or you could use a few different systems together to help you keep your project flowing well. Some options include forums, document collaboration tools, web conferencing and chat rooms.

Elance

Elance is the ultimate freelance job site that offers a great system that helps put customers and freelancers together. Not only does it match buyers and sellers but the tools in the system help you manage the process from start to finish.

If you’ve ever used Elance, various aspects of projects are tracked through the systems which are useful both for the provider and the buyer. If you’re managing a customer project the Elance system setup allows for conversations about the project to be saved in one place, for both parties to track the involved funds, for a chat room, status reports and more. While this tool doesn’t easily manage a large project with many providers, it can be very useful and does have team capabilities.

Skype

Skype is a chat tool that also allows video conferencing, voice conversations, instant messaging and document sharing. It also saves text discussions which can help you with organization.

This is a service that has a free service or a fee based service. If you have a headset and a webcam you can have regular meetings with clients and project team members. Using Skype can also save you substantially on long distance calling because you can call for free from computer to computer or pay a flat fee to call other mobile or land lines.

As a freelancer it’s a good idea to invest in tools that help you grow your business but a lot of the free tools can be very effective as well. Whether you pay for a project management tool for your computer, subscribe to a web based collaboration tool, have your client supply one or use one of the many free online tools that are available it’s important to find something that works well for you because it’ll help you effectively manage the projects you handle so that balls do not get dropped and so that you have back-up and documentation if you need to handle any client disputes.

Forums

Community forums offer a great way to collaborate online. They can be set up so that people can talk and discussions can be organized. You can even assign tasks in some robust forum solutions. This can work well too because login names and passwords and permissions are assigned so it can be set up as completely private. Also, various sub folders in the forum can exist and people can set up permissions so you can have one forum for executive discussions and various other folders set for workgroups within the project team. Many forum systems are free for basic use and then offer add-on modules that allow additional features (such as a support ticket system.) Email alerts can be set up to notify forum members when something new has been posted or when something has been delegated and group announcements can go out as well.

Support Ticket Systems

Some web based project management applications have a ticket system feature to allow you to delegate and assign and track tasks. You can set up a forum that works with this type of system as well. These systems often have great reporting capabilities that can aid in the management of a project. The ticket system can notify someone on the project of various things like: new tasks, problems, items delegated to them or issues that are resolved. Reporting can also be pulled from these systems to analyze the project as well as individual team member response and performance.

Google Documents

Google Documents offers a free web based document sharing solution. If you have a Google account, you can collaborate with clients through document sharing tools. This allows you to share documents with clients and track conversations related to those discussions.

Microsoft Office’s Word

Microsoft Word allows you to track changes to any document. This can be very helpful in a collaborative effort because you can request revisions, see document changes and share with others.

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat is a very collaborative tool as well. While this isn’t free it does offer some great features for document sharing.

Project Management Tools: Find The Right Tools

It may take time to find the right tools to help you do projects effectively. The more projects you manage the more you’ll put together a bag of tricks to help you shine as a great contributor in the future.

For freelancers who work on their own, especially, collaborative project management tools can make a big difference because various individuals working on a project might not ever meet in a boardroom together yet everyone needs to communicate. For this reason, web based solutions can be the most suitable because you can meet live, leave messages for one another and have sub groups within a larger group.

Here is a short list of ten project management solutions you might also consider:

1. WebEx Weboffice
2. DeskShare ProjectDesk
3. Easyprojects.net
4. AceProject
5. Clarizen
6. Genius Project
7. Basecamp
8. Zoho Projects
9. ProjectsCenter
10. Liquid Planner

Most of these tools offer free trials for their software so you can test drive it before you buy. You can also read product reviews to find out what others are using and how it’s working out for them.

It’s a great idea to get involved with online groups when you do freelance work because this can help you stay abreast of news and information in your specialty where you’ll find out about great tools that can help you do your job better.

If your job is in project management, it’s big responsibility to let a whole project rest on your shoulders. Beyond having the right people in place, you need to have solid tools in place as well that enable you to effectively manage things and circumvent little snags before they become giant problems.

If your freelance career feels fragile because you are regularly running in multiple directions it’s time to take your personal organization more seriously. And if you’re someone who is already ultra organized you probably thrive on tools to help you so it’s a good idea to peruse some of the great online collaborative tools to enhance your productivity, too.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

It’s a spoof news rip off which will split your sides!

Check out the guy outside the store!

To counter the balance, I did do a favorable review of the Sony Reader, right here!

http://www.simonstapleton.com/wordpress/2009/01/05/who-else-got-a-sony-reader-from-santa/

Warning - some major profane language in it - if you’re easily offended, try ToysRUs.com instead.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

• Beat colleagues to promotion…
• Become a top performer…
• Become highly paid…
• Impress your CIO…
• Build influence and authority…

… with this book! It has been meticulously researched to discover the ten habits of members of the IT elite that make them stand out as the real heroes of the industry.

You can download your copy today, and here is what two  industry experts have to say.

Nick McCormick , on his blog ‘Joe and Wanda on Management ‘, reviews the book, and says:

"Simon has put together an insightful list. There is no denying that embracing the habits described in the book will make an IT professional more effective. In fact, I think doing so would make anyone in any field/industry more effective. My favorites are the first two. 1) Openly Share Knowledge and 2) Coach Others. Wouldn’t it be nice if more people embraced these habits?"

http://begoodventures.com/joeandwanda/?p=179

Eric Brown reviews the book too. See what Eric has to say about the book on his blog - here is a snippet:

"The ebook is a nice refresher of what some good habits are for IT prof essionals.  Go check it out!"

http://ericbrown.com/10-habits-of-highly-effective-it-professionals.htm

You can download this book instantly by filling out the form on the form on the right of this page.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

For most people, that is true. We’re socially conditioned to think that way.

Seth Godin recently published a post ‘The myth of big salaries (it’s all marketing) ‘ claiming that high salaries have no real impact on our lives - saying that we

can’t eat more meals in a day or wear more shoes. What matters to the manager is the relative amount.

Seth has a point, and if we were to put a rational hat on, he’d be spot on. Relative earnings mean a lot to us, more than what we actually earn. You might be spitting at the screen and shouting that I am talking crap. But nevertheless, this is true for most of society.

The recession has forced many of us to reassess what is important. Some of us have been forced, or encouraged, to take a ‘lower-level’ job - in other words a pay-cut. If relative pay is what we hold dear, then this is a wound that has cut very deep. If you’ve been through this, then you might still be smarting for years to come, even though you might have gotten your career back on track and strengthening your position (and bank balance.) Being a recession survivor is a thing to be proud of, ain’t it?

Once the recession loses its grip, I am genuinely not sure whether we will look back at survival that way. When you read Seth Godin’s article, and put on the rational hat, there will be a lot to be thankful for. High Salary is a myth we have created, and we buy into out of irrational belief. But let’s face it, to be human is to be irrational.

I think the answer is to stay consistent with how we’re measuring ourselves. If relative pay is our personal Key Performance Indicator, then continue to measure that, but over a longer period of time. A relatively weak position today could prove to be a relatively strong one tomorrow. In other words, we shouldn’t ride the rollercoaster and expect our height not to change. We’re all on the rollercoaster - but sat in different seats. We’ll find that our relative position hasn’t really changed once the volatility subsides.

I am confident that we won’t stop measuring success as a relative position overnight, or for the next few decades. Whilst our entire economic system is measured on growth (and relative growth) then most of us in our endeavour to survive and be great will follow suit. A rational hat tells us that’s crap, and it is, but if we led our lives with that hat permanently fixed upon our heads then we’re denying our own humanity. It’s a true conundrum.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Hopefully, I’ll give you a start. I’ve just read ‘Lead Well and Prosper ‘ by Nick McCormick - 15 successful strategies for becoming a good manager.

It’s unique: you’ll find non-fiction punctuated by fictional episodes for a high-impact effect, and this is what makes this book special.

Each of the successful strategies is articulated using extremes. Using fictional characters (such as Joe Kerr, the spiteful asshole-boss (perhaps Juan Kerr would have been a better name!), and Wanda B. Goode, the progressive professional with halo), Nick uses these extreme behaviors to illustrate how people behave in the workplace, and how a manager’s modus operandi have a stifling and degenerative effect on their reports. The extremes serve as a humorous yet poignant perspective on the way people really do behave in the workplace - I bet you recognize yourself at both extremes if you look back on your career!

The conversations between the characters is farcical, yes, but reflective of the conversations that go on inside the heads of people as they interact to go achieve their professional goals. The farce is grounded in the reality of human behavior.

Each chapter addresses a strategy (behavior). It begins with the ‘conversation’ which stirs up the reader’s emotions to understand what each strategy addresses. Then, Nick gives us commentary on the behavior and how the strategy is an appropriate solution. Each chapter is then concluded with a list of things to do and not to do in order to achieve the strategy, and a list of easily actionable steps to take. It’s a powerful writing technique.

The strategies are:

1. Adopt a Serving Attitude
2. Teach
3. Provide Honest and Timely Feedback
4. Share Information
5. Listen
6. Treat People Like Human Beings
7. Set Goals, Plan and Execute
8. Learn
9. Do the Right Thing
10. Embrace the Uncomfortable
11. Clean Up Your Own House First
12. Persist
13. Do What You Say Will Do
14. Always Follow Up
15. Plan Your Week

The chapter I found the most powerful and motivational is 10) Embrace the Uncomfortable; this is an eye-opener. I see folks in the workplace NOT doing this, and to some extent, I see it in myself. At times, we all avoid pain in order for an ‘easy’ time - but guess what - we just store up trouble and then have to deal with it when the pain is much worse. In fact I will be publishing an article on this very subject soon (subscribe to my RSS feed so you will know when!)

The book is short, just 93 pages, but don’t see that as a negative. This book is short, and sweet . It’s brevity is what gives it its freshness and page-turn appeal. It doesn’t assume too much about its reader, other than that they want to learn and grow.

This book isn’t just for managers or leaders. It’s not even just for people who want to become a manager or leader. This book addresses challenges that we all face in the workplace, so I think any professional in any industry will enjoy it and put it to good use.

By now, I hope I’ve convinced you that this is a unique book. It stands out from the other management books I’ve read over the years! Lead Well and Prosper is a bargain at only $14.95 , available from Amazon. Order today and you’ll get it tomorrow!

Buy This Book Today : Lead Well and Prosper: 15 Successful Strategies for Becoming a Good Manager

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Most of us work hard to build a career. Each promotion is another stepping stone towards whatever we decide is ‘Success’. We plough our energy into achieving this goal. We toil. We struggle. And we’re rewarded with another step. And we go on. But what if we have to consider taking a step back onto the stone we just moved off? Does this mean we are less successful? How do we decide to take that backwards leap?

This is an agonizing decision - I know, I have been there. During the last ‘IT Recession’ when the dotcom bust was in full swing, I chose to leave the e-commerce practice I had built up to join a infrastructure service company as a project manager. The job demanded much less than I was really capable of, and the pay was $30k less. So you can imagine how the decision wasn’t taken likely.

Why did I do it?

The motivation was clear - I really needed to get out of a situation I knew would collapse, and I had a strong desire to join a sector that was likely to grow. I could have pretended that everything would be ok. I could have made the common mistake by waiting longer for a fat severence check (which, incidentally, I would have soon received.) But I had to face facts - I had to walk or be stuck in a miserable job that was going nowhere (and soon be out of it entirely.)

I chose to take a ‘lower-level’ job as it was a solution to both of my problems. And I just knew that once I entered the new job, I could accelerate my career again. And I did just that. Within a couple of years I was Head of IT for a Financial Services organization, with renewed confidence.

Here’s a question: should we look at a job change like this as a move to a ‘lower-level’ job?

Guess what - I don’t think so.

If we look at a change like this purely from the perspective of status then it will do our head in, and create an irrational response that won’t do jack other than hinder ourselves. It’s a shot in the foot. Don’t do it.

Rather, if a shift in jobs means that we get back onto a career track and can pay the bills, then it’s a step forward. A Big One.

Meridith Levinson is a blogger on CIO.COM I respect. Meridith has just posted a great article on the site on this subject, the title of which I blatantly and shamelessly adopted for this post. Meridith shares the opinions of Steve Watson, a chairman of an executive search firm. Steve believes that employees at all levels (including executives) must consider taking lower-level roles under current market conditions. Steve asserts that, for the talented, this ‘downward’ move is only temporary.

It takes guts to accept this move. To take a downward step requires confidence that career aspirations can once again be fulfilled. Then again, reality bites: if you find yourself in a job that you’re unhappy and unproductive in, or if you’re out of work entirely, getting a surer foot back onto the career ladder is a wise tactic.

Besides, if it works for people starting an IT career, why wouldn’t it work for experienced workers too?

Have You taken a downward step? Or are you considering it? Has it worked for You? Share your story below by leaving a comment.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

I started this blog in it’s current guise a year ago, and it’s been quite a journey. Like most bloggers, I started by dabbling, and then when onto rambling, progressed onto babbling, but then it got serious. I realized how much I was enjoying it, particularly when I would get an interesting reaction from a commentator.

Now I have hit the 300 post mark, I am thinking about What Next? I won’t pretend that I am machivelian and that ‘this belongs to my readers, not me’. No, this is my blog. But the readers of this blog make it what it is, and I am always keen that I write about subjects that add value and solve problems for readers.

More recently, I refocused on recession survival. If the economic climate changes soon, I’ll refocus again towards building on the upturn . Only if I enjoy writing about it, and that readers value that.

The next step is to build more authority on the subjects that matter to IT professionals, leaders and freelancers. These are the groups of people I have the most affinity with and enjoy solving problems for.

Guess what though, knowing what your problems are takes a lot of time and a lot of research ! Because of that, I am always on the prowl for the interesting stories and problems that matter to you…. so let me hear them!

Solve problems with my help. Let me know what bugs you, frustrates you, pisses you off… and I promise to give it my best shot in solving the problem with you and all readers!

You know how: leave a comment, or contact me using the details on my About page!

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

In January of 2009, this blog received 1,455 comment spamming attempts, which my spam filter (Akismet) foiled. The most attempts in one day, so far, is 105. Thank God for spam filters!

I’ve been lucky - nothing has gotten through yet. There are messages that don’t look like spam to Akismet: with a little bit of wisdom and a Google search, I catch the rest. If a comment looks generic, I use Google to search for the text of the comment (in quotes) to see if other bloggers have fallen foul. If I get a search hit, then I know it’s spam!

If you blog, then follow that tip to avoid your reputation being sullied by some tricky sheister!

Here is a graph of the amount of spam caught by day:

So thanks, spammers, for giving me the data to create a pretty graph like this!

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

It is this: Passion.

Students and young people are always passionate about something. Your passion is your total dedication to a chosen subject or goal. Your passion creates energy and motivation beyond anything a salary or manager can do.

Do you have a passion, and what is it?

Here’s my story. I have a passion for creativity and problem-solving. I just love a challenge and a complex problem to overcome. Whether it’s a business problem, a puzzle, or a quiz, I love it. This is why I work in innovation now, and also how I entered the IT profession as I demonstrated my aptitude as a problem solver when I joined Microsoft as a support technician. I talked about the problems I’d solved in the past (such as my final year project, where I wrote a natural language interpreter for a computer language), and my passion shone through. It wasn’t really my aptitude that got me the job; it was my passion for problem-solving.

When you talk about your passion, your whole body language changes, your eyes light up and you talk with a smile. This is hard to resist. People respond to passionate people.

What if your passion is gardening, or science fiction, or playing games on the PS3? What good are these in getting an IT job? Well, maybe more than you think.

Truly passionate people tend to show their enjoyment in their chosen interest by joining clubs and associations, writing papers, newspaper or magazine articles, participating/chairing societies or bodies, or connecting with other passionate people. What happens is that you become an authority in the subject, and have influence in the subject. Just because your passion isn’t IT related, it doesn’t mean you’re not developing business muscles and practising corporate yoga. And there is often some angle to find that demonstrates your commercial acumen.

Who will be employed first: a president of a regional camera club who can demonstrate leadership, commercial practise (such as managing budgets and committee membership), or a simple amateur photographer who has a mild interest in the subject?

The trick is to understand what you do when you pursue your passion that will have benefits in your IT job application and in performing your IT job.

Get this – everybody has a passion of some sorts. The question is, can you spot what it is and understand the commercial value of it in an organization?

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

This is a follow-on to my previous article: The 24×7 Freelancer Trap .

If you recognized the symptoms, but not sure what to do, or even if you want to do anything, then that is understandable. Perhaps being a workaholic is harder to accept and cope with more than alcoholism. The tough thing about being a workaholic is that there isn’t a great deal of social pressure to stop, or stigma attached to it. And the upside is ‘great’ - more income, more productivity, more work from your clients. It’s not really hurting anybody, right? You’re not doing harm to your health, yes?

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Being a workaholic is not good for YOU. Your body, your mental health, your social life, family life… the list can go on. But without the social pressure to stop, then it’s hard to accept as a problem.

Photo courtesy of gillespinault

What can be done?

In my last article, I started with two simple tactics to get you going.

Number One - talk to someone. A friend, your partner, your mom. Share the burden! You won’t believe how positive a chat with someone you trust can be.

Number Two - identify what you enjoy (outside of your freelancing) and do more. Do this by laying down some boundaries. Boundaries are good. Set yourself time for work, and set yourself time for fun. And stick to it. You might fail first time around, maybe second time too, and quite possibly the third, but keep trying!

The second one might have appeared trite and obvious at first. If you did feel like it is, then the effect of being a workaholic is likely to be in play and the fear of change has taken hold.

It’s like this though. The effect of the ‘trap’ needs to be reversed, not eliminated in one instant. The proces of reversal will take as long as it took to establish. It’s a case of chipping away at the problem and building on small successes.

I’m now going to make a confession. Until I experienced cancer, I was a workaholic. The impact of being yanked out of the workplace solved this problem for me. As I have said , I consider myself fortunate for this experience on many levels. Eliminating my addiction to work was one of them.

But I doubt you are that fortunate. I dearly hope you are not.

What can YOU do to reverse the process? Here are some suggestions:

Get physical - expend the energy you would plough into work doing something physical, like taking a run or visiting the gym. The effect of the exercise will stimulate other parts of your brain that have been neglected.

Plan recreate in locations you can’t work - get into the open countryside or up a mountain - anywhere you can’t take a laptop or your iPhone won’t have a signal.

Don’t talk shop - avoid talking about work, your projects and your clients with your spouse outside of normal office hours. When you talk about work, your mind starts to race and you’re back in the groove.

Refuse to feel guilty when you’re not working - This is probably the most important and difficult step of all. It takes guts and courage. But try it - rationalize downtime as well as you rationalize continued work. Deliberately (and it might seem falsely at first) tell yourself that fun and leisure are important activities.

Measure the effect of not working - once you’ve tried the above tactics, measure their effect. Are projects suffering? Are clients angry? Is your bank balance reducing? I suspect they’re not. Maybe the opposite. It’s important to assess and measure the implications of the changes you’re making to gain confidence that they’re effective.

Consider outsourcing some work - if you’re a one-person band then you’re doing everything from billable work to admin. Can you outsource your admin? Or subcontract some work? Some jobs you do are not a good use of your time - they are a cost (loss) against your profit. See this from a Profit & Loss (P&L) viewpoint, like the big companies do. Once you see the cost of doing the jobs that don’t bring in the cash, then you might see the benefit of outsourcing them!

Consult with a business expert - Business Process Re-engineering isn’t just for the top 10 of the NASDAQ. And it isn’t as grandiose as you might think. Consulting with a business expert may help you surface inefficiencies in your business and spot things you’re doing that are not effective.

I just want to close by saying this - I was lucky to escape the 24×7 trappings by a serious illness. I haven’t had to go through the journey of reversal. So I can’t speak from a position of experience - only awareness of the problem and sensitivities to how the reversal can be achieved.

Have you been through this journey….. or are you still on it?

Share your story!

UPDATE: Check out the great post on FreelancerFolder.com for some inspiring ways to create more free time.

http://freelancefolder.com/how-to-find-more-personal-time/

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

We market for a simple reason. If our customers (existing and potential) don’t know we exist, what we do, and how we can benefit them, how will we get more work?

Savvy freelancers like you know that marketing is a core function of your business. Of course, you want to get the most from it - it can be expensive in terms of your time and cost. So how are you approaching marketing?

I’ve learned quite a lot about this, in fact, over the last few weeks whilst chatting to freelancers who are still making waves during the recession. I’ve pulled together their key tactics and share them below:

1. Keep spending if you have the money - as recession bites, prices drop, and that includes marketing services. If you have cash to spend on marketing, you’ll be getting some good deals. Marketing firms have much more spare inventory during a recession, as your competitors scale back. So spend now to gain the extra benefit. This will improve your brand and land higher quality clients. The return on investment will be high.
2. Communicate your value - focus your marketing messages on the business benefits you bring to your clients. Use benefits, rather than features. This should include case examples to demonstrate that you walk-the-walk with other clients. Use ‘econometrics’ where you can, i.e. describe the return on investment you provide to your clients
3. Focus on your top clients - your top clients give you your top dollar, or more guarantees of income, if there is such a thing. Market to your top clients to remind them about the value you have added to them and emphasize the benefits of your continued relationship. Make them feel important, and valued. Now is not the time to lose profitable clients. The other side to this is looking at unprofitable clients - is there business you do where you barely break even? Consider scaling back on marketing to these people.
4. Align to your market - being a one-trick pony in these times will be very tough. You might have already been forced to take on projects outside of your core focus. Your marketing energy should align to your market - are you addressing their top concerns? Are you showing affinity with their business challenges? The truth is, the expectations of your market have changed, and so will their decision-making practices, so don’t lose an opportunity to show how you’re adpating too!
5. Send the right message - right now, your clients want safety and security, both at home and at work. As well as aligning to their business challenges, set the right tone in terms of their individual needs.  This includes showing how you are a ’safe bet’ rather than maverick. Humor and extremism won’t press the right buttons. Reassure instead. Show that you’re a friend with the future of your client’s at the core of your proposition.
   Here’s an interesting example on Chris Brogan’s blog when a marketing message might be a shot in the foot. Note the subtleties of the message and how if you don’t think it through it can have the opposite impact to what you intended.
   http://www.chrisbrogan.com/sending-the-wrong-message/
6. Switch channels - do you do online only? Or maybe you work through personal referrals? Consider adding marketing channels, or switching entirely. This doesn’t mean you’ll lose business in your existing channels, but if they’re drying up or stagnating then try a different direction for a while.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

You can influence my design choice! Tell me what I should do to my theme.

So, should I…

1. Change the theme entirely? Any ideas to which theme?
2. Change just some elements of the current theme?
3. Leave the current theme as it is?

Your opinions will rock!

Simon

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

1. The excess of boom-times causes business leaders, in recession, to shelve projects that were once considered strategic. Why? Typically the outcome of the project is considered to add little to the core of your organization - strengthening the core of a business emerges as the primary focus as recession takes hold. These ad-hoc projects probably still look like they create competitive advantage or disrupt your market, but in a recession it’s doing the basics very well that counts. Take a look at your project and consider if its objective addresses issues at the core of the organization - operations. There is a painful truth about these projects - they were initiated by managers who were blind to the possibility that an economic downturn was ahead (or hoped that it wasn’t), and then inept management didn’t ensure that the cost-benefit held up even during a downturn.
2. Projects will also be postponed should their result add cost to operations . A project doesn’t end when the Project Manager closes the gantt chart. The objectives of the project (assuming they were met) result an effect that live on in the business. These might be the need for extra infrastructure, extra people, more capital (money), etc. So even if a project focuses on the core and is deliverable by affordable means it doesn’t mean that it has a viable future.
3. Political shift is a major cause of projects being consigned to the dustbin. Recession create sturmoil in an organization, particularly when funding for projects is competed for and impacts the funding of operations. When the guys at the top begin to shift around, so does the context of the organization and the decision-making. Projects cancellation, in these circumstances, looks completely irrational and folly, and guess what - you’re right. But this happens. A classic example of this is the dismantling of the British aircraft industry since the 70s where project after project was cancelled due to political shift in the Royal Air Force and the UK government. Each project in isolation promised to deliver more capable aircraft and would have kept the UK at the forefront of military aircraft technology.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

This word is Maybe .

Maybe is the boon of any salesperson or freelancer. Maybe lacks commitment and sets no boundaries for further discussion. You don’t know where you are with Maybe. If you hear Maybe, then where do you go from there?

The word Yes is also negative when used in the context of a negotiation. If you hear Yes, without hearing No first, how far do you think your client would have gone? If you haven’t established first what your client won’t accept, you could have missed out on extra revenue.

No, therefore, is the most positive word you can hear in a negotiation. When you hear No, you will have learned the boundary in which you can negotiate from.

If price is the sticking point of a deal, then in most cases your client doesn’t want your product enough. This is important as they’ve already decided that your product is a solution to their problem.

When you hear No, do you immediately jump to cutting price? Most people do.

Price isn’t the only negotiable factor. Can you do deliver the goods to the client for the price they dislike faster, or to greater volume, or with some added extras that sweeten the deal and break down your client’s objections to your price?

For example, you could offer support, or maintenance, or consulting time.

So when you’re negotiating, then my advice is to start at a high price (this is often what is known as a list price.) And then prepare to concede on something until you get to a price or other concession where No turns to Yes (not Maybe.)

If Maybe is always your answer, then chances are that there are other factors at play. Could be that your client isn’t serious about the deal. Or perhaps they don’t have the authority to shake hands with you and seal the deal. Sometimes, clients will say Myabe when they mean No Deal at all, because they are too scared to give you the bad news. They could just be wasting your time by using your price as a leverage with other providers. If Maybe is a brick-wall that you can’t climb over, and it seems an irrational response from your client, then you only have one option. Walk away . Get out of there. If they’re serious, they will ask you back.

Next time, I’ll tell you about advanced negotiation techniques, and why the ‘Win-Win’ is a foolhardy proposition! To learn when I publish this article, subscribe to my RSS feed .

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

A growing use of Twitter is in the domain of job hunting. The capacity for building relationships using Twitter is phenomenal, and this is why your job search can take a new angle.

The essence of Twitter is the establishing of followership - long term, inobtrusive relationships. These relationships are based on relevance, i.e. people follow each other because they’re saying something interesting, and it’s this basis of relatedness which builds trust and authority.

And guess what - if you’re looking for work in a specific industry, niche, or role, then it’s likely you will have tweeted about that subject in the past.

So what better than to leverage your followership to seek job opportunities?

If you’re looking for work, then why not tweet the fact?

Tweet what projects you’ve worked on, or what you’d like to work on. Tweet about the challenges you’ve faced and overcome in your work. Tweet about your aspirations. As long as it is relevant, people will listen. And maybe, respond.

This isn’t a deterministic strategy - there is no guarantee that this will land the dream job. But it is low cost and low effort. Having said that, just because it is low effort, it doesn’t mean you can be lazy. This strategy requires you to be selective about what you tweet. If you’re building up the interest and intrigue in a number of prospective recruiting managers (you’ll know this if they reply or retweet your own tweets) then you could destroy your progress by a careless tweet about what you got up to last night (and who with).

Of course, this only works if you have followers! How do you encourage followers?

There is an etiquette of a sorts (is that twitiquette?) where following is reciprocated (but not always). The most effective way of building your followeship is (you guessed it) to follow others. But only follow tweeters relevant to your interests and industry. It’s no good following a turnip grower if you’re looking for a job in fine art. Follow people, and they will probably follow you.

Just a point on the twitiquette - be aware of what rocks and what sucks on Twitter. You’ll be an outcast if you get it wrong.

So Twitter has great potential in searching the hidden job market ! Here’s a great article on the essentials of Twitter:

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/the_thoughtful_user_guide/writing_my_twitter_etiquette_article_14_ways_to_use_twitter_politely.php

I’ll finish by including another link to the CIO.COM website which gives you more advice on using Twitter in your job search:

http://www.cio.com/article/482324/Twitter_Tips_How_to_Use_Twitter_to_Job_Hunt

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

There are things that we can do that won’t help our situation, even though it might feel a relief at the time. Below, you’ll see some of the typical ‘unusual behaviors’ observed in a recession. When I say ‘observed’ I have only had to look in the mirror for some! See if you recognize any of these behaviors, in yourself or your colleagues.

• Gossip - The rumor mill grows in a recession. I’m sure you noticed! Most people wonder what will happen to their organization - whether it will survive, will there be job cuts, will they be outsourced… and when worried people get together, rumors begin. A little bit of information is made to go a long way! Sharing gossip gives temporary comfort that we’re not alone, and that other people are in the same situation. Safety in numbers. Guess what though, the relief is short lived. Rumors, once they start, can have a devastating effect. Worried people slow down their work. Their brainpower is spent worrying, and not working. And when you’re not working productively, guess who managers look at to give the elbow, should it come to that? Worrying and rumors can create a self-fulfiling prophecy! I know it’s hard (believe me, I know!) to not get involved in rumors. But it’s a slippery slope. It’s much better to walk away - don’t even try to argue the opposite case. It’s that simple - walk away.

• Avoiding discussion - no I haven’t gone mad or become forgetful. This is different from being a member of the rumor mill. Avoiding discussion is when you close yourself off to information about the impact of the recession and any changes happening. During a recession, you need more quality information, not less. Changes will happen, so it’s much better to know the context in which they’re happening, mostly to accept them. Talk to your boss, or your Human Resources department. Or any senior manager. Become informed, so you can cope with changes.
• Expecting no change - recession (strangely) always seems unforeseen. This means, well laid plans will change. Funding is withdrawn for projects, people move around, or people go. This is a fact. Expecting no change at all is foolhardy. The way I deal with this is to consider (but not necessarily act upon) all possible changes, and visualize myself having gone through the change. Visualization is a powerful technique!
• Searching for other jobs - people do this for the wrong reasons. Mostly because of one of the above. Apart from the stress and distraction this causes, searching for another job can be a waste of your time if you have no solid reason to. If you find yourself looking at the job sites, think about why. Are your reasons grounded in fact? Are you reasons definite, or just a possibility? Are you acting emotionally?
• Holding out for severence - equally irrational is when people hold on in the belief that their big payout is due. OK, this might happen, but in the mean time you’ll be stressed, anxious and looking for every opportunity to walk. You might just be one of those people who is asked to stay. If severence comes, it comes, but in the meantime focus on your work and contribute to the success of your organization. This will only do your future opportunities and your confidence good in the end!
• Not leaving when the signs are there - not really a counterpoint to the above, but sometimes you just KNOW that your organization is on its knees. Staying around is just pretence. And dangerous for your prospects. When your organization does eventually go under, guess what? There are loads of people from your organization on the job market and you’re in much heavier competition. Is this a risk you want to take?
• Not getting help - this is the biggest mistake to make of all. We can’t all get through recession by ourselves. It’s a tough, stressful time. If you just stew in your own juices, will you make rational decisions? I don’t think so. Getting help is a positive way of gaining control. You need to have a clear head to make rational decisions. It’s much better to get help and not eventually need it, rather than when you’re desperate for it! Have a private word with HR, or talk to a trusted friend, spouse, or coach.

Maybe you recognize some of these behaviors? If you do, then try following my advice. Best of all, get help!

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Instead, you slide out of bed still half asleep, switch on your computer, check your emails, take a look at your online checking account balance, spent 30mins tweaking some code or whatever, reply to comments on your favorite forums,  you check who’s just followed you on Twitter, replied to your ‘friends’ on Facebook, and engaged in 5 concurrent conversations on IM.

Before you know it, it’s past noon and you haven’t even brushed your teeth or visited the bathroom for your morning constitutional. BANG! You’re a slave to the trappings of freelancing without boundaries.

If you recognize yourself here, welcome to the Guild of 24×7 Freelancers!

Sounds pretty drastic, eh?

If you still think that this describes ’someone else’ then ask yourself these questions:

• Do you feel agitated if you haven’t checked your email or twitter account within 2 hours of waking up?
• Do you solve tricky problems in your head whilst watching a movie with your partner, and sneak onto your computer to test it out?
• Do you have more online friends than you do in the flesh?
• Do you begin work whilst still in your pjamas?
• Are invites to a friends place or a restaurant filtered in your mind to check that you’ll have time to work around it?
• Do you spend more time talking to online friends than your flesh-and-blood friends?
• If your kids disturb you whilst you’re working, do you get pissed off?

If you answer Yes to more than one or two of these, then you’re a fully fledged associate of the Guild of 24×7 Freelancers!

Feeling this trapped inside something YOU created is frustrating! You can’t blame your boss unless you blame yourself. The nature of this problem is that it starts small - one extra email here, one brief phone call there, but it escalates . Like the boiled frog , your behavior slowly shifts. It creeps further and further, biting deeper and deeper into your lifestyle and mindset, and you’re probably not aware it is happening, or quite possibly, you’re aware it is happening but you let it happen anyway.

Worse still, at points of epiphany (when you realize that your working hours are escalating) you might rationalize it into a hard-work ethic. You’re not a workaholic, right? You’ll have fun once you’ve finished your work . Guess what though, work never finishes!

Workaholics Anonymous say that the 7-signs of warning that you might be a workaholic are:

1. Instead of accepting yourself, you seek approval and justification for your existence in work.
2. You work to escape your feelings, shutting out your true needs and wants.
3. You use work to tamp down the uncertainties of life by over-organizing and refusing to give up control, losing your spontaneity and creativity.
4. You create crises and get adrenalin highs by overworking to resolve indigenous problems, then suffer withdrawals into anxiety and depression.
5. You hoard work to insure you will always be busy, seemingly important and never bored.
6. You fear free time.
7. You’re typically a perfectionist, unwilling to ask for help or delegate because no one can meet your standards.

How do you feel about this? Sad, mad… indifferent?

No matter. Realizing that you’ve slipped into this lifestyle is the first step towards deciding if it is good for you!

If you don’t like it, then what do you do?

Number One - talk to someone. A friend, your partner, your mom. Share the burden! You won’t believe how positive a chat with someone you trust can be.

Number Two - identify what you enjoy (outside of your freelancing) and do more. Do this by laying down some boundaries. Boundaries are good. Set yourself time for work, and set yourself time for fun. And stick to it. You might fail first time around, maybe second time too, and quite possibly the third, but keep trying!

There is more! I’ll be following up this article soon with more tips for getting yourself out of the trap, and leaving the Guild of 24×7 Freelancers behind! Want to know when? Then subscribe to my RSS feed .

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Good News people: according to McKinsey’s Quarterly Survey , we are getting close to the bottom of the trough we call recession (although European business leaders say that there is still a longer, bumpier road ahead).

The cycle of boom and bust (which nobody can really stop) will turn full circle and the upturn will be upon us.

There is light at the end of the tunnel…?

But are we looking in that direction yet? My personal experience is No We Are Not .  We are not looking towards recovery.

The current battle with keeping business going is consuming all the energy, all the air-time, and all the focus of management, at least in my industry (Financial Services). I am still seeing cycles of re-plan after re-plan to cope with declining budgets and lackluster sales. Do me and my colleagues see the light yet? No.

Get this though - just because I don’t see the light yet, I know it’s coming.

Not preparing for the upturn will mean that we will be caught with our pants down when it comes… whilst our competitors are running ahead in their jockstraps!

Here’s the rub. Even talk about this evokes comments from blinkered colleagues on the lines of ‘Fiddling Whilst Rome is Burning’.

It could be political suicide to try to initiate new projects with the blind assumption that the upswing will be soon upon us. It takes someone with tremendous courage, political leverage and credibility to sponsor these projects, which will almost certainly disrupt current projects that are aimed at stabilizing core business. Is that you?

This is a major stifler of innovation. The fresh business ideas that would normally emerge in boom-times are being quashed. Growth opportunities are being put on the back-burner. When recovery does start, we’ll all be so beat and scared, we won’t be ready to begin that journey!

Hey, what about our people? The most worrying thing about not preparing for the upturn NOW is what our people will do when it starts. Will they want to stay in an organization still inward looking at the balance sheet, or a competitor that is going places with exciting new products and services? This is a Real Danger which we cannot ignore! I doubt we’ll even have cash to offer as a retention incentive. Our people will be GONE!

I wonder, who is going to be brave and put the first foot forwards into the future?

If you don’t believe in the phrase ’Fortune Favors the Brave!’  - well, there are a few things we can do now to begin preparing for the upturn, without embarking on taboo projects or appearing to meddle whilst Rome is in flames.

Later this week I will be publishing a follow-up post which shares ‘5 Immediate Actions To Begin Preparing For The Upturn, Without Being Found Out ‘. You’ll know when it’s published if you subscribe to my RSS Feed .

Check This Out…

Here is a great clip from the Jeff & Mike radio talk show on the subject of the upturn.

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

I contacted 50 readers and put that very question to them. What was the answer?

The consensus - a lot of people are nervous about losing their job, and high performance is seen as a means of staying at the top of their game, and (in secret) staying head and shoulders above their peer group. So it seems that excellence in performance is top of the agenda for IT Professionals whilst the economic future looks uncertain.

So to recap, here are all my recent articles on Performance Reviews, consolidated for you pleasure.

• Pre-Register for the FREE ‘ACE Your Performance Review Crash Course’

• 6 Powerful Questions To Ask In Your Performance Review

• 6 More Powerful Questions To Ask At Your Performance Review

• 10 Performance Review Affirmations

• 10 IT Manager Performance Review Affirmations

• How To Improve Your Performance With 8 Weekly Events

• Make Your Next Performance Appraisal ROCK!

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Despite what many marketers would like us to believe, there isn’t a magic bullet to become rich overnight, notwithstanding major inheritance or a lottery win. Building a career is like building a space rocket . But there are clear formulas for accelerating success in order to earn major salaries and become rich. These formulas are not tricks, secrets or an asset of an inner circle, which means I can share them with you with confidence that you can follow them too.

There are two ‘paths’ you can choose from in order to become a big-shot with a big wallet. These paths are somewhat mutually exclusive (i.e. you can’t do both at the same time) but they can be interchanged, at will, to become a blended success strategy. Both rely entirely on the generation of value to their organization, but each has its own different way of manifesting the value. Generating value = generating profit, hence why highly successful IT Professionals use one (or both of these paths) to create success and wealth.

In the eBook ‘The Ten Habits of Highly Successful IT Professionals ‘, I share with you tactics on effective value delivery. If you haven’t read this report yet, then I can send it to you immediately if you fill out the short form on the right of this page.

Although each path, as you will find out, has its distinctions, pros and cons, both paths have one thing in common though - they require an attitude for success:

Path One: The Rich Guru

In Information Technology (especially when starting out a career in the industry), we have the choice to become a guru in a particular technology or method. E.g. system performance, RATIONAL development, or ITIL.

A guru is a person who has developed their skills and wisdom in a technology to the point that they are a recognized expert, or guru, in its application. You probably know some, or have heard of them. These are the people who are dropped into a project for a specific purpose, enjoy all the air-time, and then disappear as quickly as they came. They become the SWAT team of problems or opportunities.

The career of a guru follows a fairly linear path of acquisition of knowledge and experience, bound together by a string of high-profile successes (and also failures). As their career progresses, they earn increasing amounts of trust in their employers or clients, and also credibility in their technology and the technology community. This is because the number of people with equivalent knowledge and experience to a would-be guru diminishes exponentially, as this illustration shows:

The guru becomes as such when their name is recognized and associated with the technology, before anything else. The very name of these people is a brand that commands respect and generates equity for the guru. They’re quoted in the press, and sought for comment on the technology they master.

For example, Jim Gray was a renowned guru in MS SQL and scalable servers

Don Page is known to be the Godfather of ITIL, and certainly qualifies as a guru.

The wealth of a guru is a result of increasing salaries and incentives (such as bonus, stock-options, etc) to stay with their employer, or be exclusive to their client. This is for two main reasons: 1) because they deliver much more value to their employer than they extract, and 2) their employer doesn’t want the guru to be made available to their competition.

Other streams of income eventually come from becoming a speaker at industry events and writing books, or it can be as simple as writing a foreword in a technology book. The power of the guru’s brand makes marketers drool, and the guru can make serious cash from endorsements.

Pros:

• The guru has total control of their destiny
• There is much esteem associated with being a technology guru
• Future opportunities are in abundance (see below for a caveat!)
• Opportunities to generate wealth are numerous

Cons:

• The value of the guru to employers, clients and the social fabric diminishes as the value of their chosen technology diminishes to the same communities. I doubt a guru in PSTN dial-up will have the same value and future prospects now as he did 20 years ago.
• It’s high-risk: one piece of bad advice or failed project could spell disaster for credibility. It could be a major fall from grace.
• It’s an insular path. Becoming a guru is an inward-looking path that focuses on the contribution to the guru’s knowledge, experience and brand rather than on the contribution to other people (which is a secondary outcome).

Path Two: Serial Contributor

The serial contributor is someone who makes it their mission to contribute to the success of other people. Wait though, aren’t we talking about personal success and riches here? We sure are, and this is path is as valid as the first.

So what I am talking about? I am talking about the path of the entrepreneur . But I want to qualify something first. An entrepreneur isn’t just someone who operates independently outside of an employers terms. Entrepreneurs can be employees too. To make this distinction, the term intrapreneur was developed. But I’ll just use the term entrepreneur from this point, and an entrepreneur’s client can be external and internal to an organization.

Examples of great entrepreneurs working inside an organization are:

• Spencer Silver & Art Fy who developed Post-It notes whilst at global company 3M.
• Ken Kutaragi pioneered the Sony Playstation during his time at Sony’s sound labs, who then founded the Sony Computer Entertainment division.

An entrepreneur is a person who makes money by continually contributing to the success of other people and their organization. The entrepreneur takes their cut, but the majority of the value created is experienced by their client.

The difference between an entrepreneur and someone who is ‘just helpful’ is that an entrepreneur thinks big. In other words, they’re helpful to many people in many ways and make enough profit from each instance that they can make it big.

How do you make ‘profit’ inside an organization? Isn’t this the key to the success of this path? Sure it is, and I want to explain how profit is generated inside an organization; Profit isn’t immediate cash, except if you’re on a sales commission of course. What I mean is that real profit (cash) occurs through the generation of equity in the organization. Equity is a measure (often intangible) of goodwill, respect, achievement, influence, power and authority. The more you gain in these things, the more real profit can be extracted in the end (i.e. through bonuses, stock options, etc).

Back to the ‘contribution’. An entrepreneur makes it his or her job to help others to be successful, and does this by using their knowledge, resources, influence, contacts, and charisma . Entrepreneurs have lots of these things, but for most, it is charisma that starts it all off.

Charisma is the ability to influence people through charm. Have you noticed that some people can get things done just by asking for it, without any formal power to enforce? These people will probably have lots of charisma. It’s an intangible quality, but you know it when you see it. It is the essence of leadership and the basis of getting things done with people who feel good about it.

By using charisma and their other tools, entrepreneurs influence other people to take actions to help themselves and others. The role of the entrepreneur is to solve problems in order to contribute to a successful outcome, and the benefit is felt by the organization. In turn, trust, respect, influence and equity grows in the entrepreneur. It becomes a virtuous cycle.

The entrepreneur cashes in their equity at various point in their career by negotiating bonuses, options, as I mentioned above.

Pros:

• Very fulfilling and rewarding from a point of self-esteem
• Future opportunities are very diverse as entrepreneurialism is largely industry-independent
• Contacts and relationships can be exploited in the future
• Failure is very much part of entrepreneurialism, and therefore has less stigma attached to it

Cons:

• Because this is about people, success is not totally in control of the entrepreneur, and is dependent on culture, morale and the zeitgeist of the organization
• Susceptible to major organizational changes or mergers/acquisitions. Equity could disappear overnight if it isn’t spread across the organization to cope with organization restructure. E.g. a team leader will lose all her equity if it is just stored up in the relationship with her boss, and then her boss retires
• Success can be at the mercy of resource availability (I found this article which explains more: Creative Entrepreneurship in a Downturn )
• Unsteady work patterns
• Can be very stressful

I mentioned that you can interchange between paths at will. Nothing will stop you except for your own intuition and the goals you have set yourself. When and how you interchange them will be dependent on your own situation. It is perfectly viable to focus on a single path. Many people do this to great success and wealth. Most of us will choose different paths at different times.

Which do I think is the most successful path?

I tend towards entrepreneur, but in truth I use both paths at different times. I have learned how to make the best use of each path at the right time. For example, when developing my blog, I require both:

• Continue to research my subject and grow my knowledge about the industry and technologies (guru)
• Learn more about how technology is applied to business and its impact on people (guru)
• Write useful content that will solve the problems of my readers (guru)
• Apply my solutions to my readers problems (entrepreneur)
• Promote my blog to people who are experiencing these problems (entrepreneur)
• Connect with other bloggers who are addressing people with similar problems (entrepreneur)

Get the picture?

Whichever path you choose, having a path is what it is all about. You won’t get rich by focusing on yourself without building significant knowledge and experience you can apply in business. Nor will you become wealthy if you’re helpful but don’t make sure you earn equity in your organization. Choosing a path means you know how you will generate value, and more to the point, so do other people who will be your paymasters!

What about Recession?

In an economic downturn, you won’t see an abundance of bonuses and discretionary payment. (If you do, such as in the case of the banking industry, the press descend like vultures!)

However, this doesn’t mean that equity isn’t accrued. In fact the opposite is true. Value contribution to an organization is even more important during an economic crisis, and those people who generate the most value will eventually reap the rewards, albeit sometimes by a deferred payment. In many cases, promotion or other financial incentives are offered which can result in significant payback once the economy recovers.

How do I start my journey on a path?

Well, first I think you need to have an idea of what success means to you, and let this guide you in which path you choose at this moment. You might need to do some intense soul-searching and ponderation (I think I just made that word up) to come to a conclusion on the path you will choose. Remember, you don’t need to stay on one path forever, but you should only tread one path at a time.

Coming Soon…

I will be talking to some gurus and entrepreneurs about their experiences on their path, and also I will share some insider tips on how to move quickly along your path. Receive notification when I write about these subjects by subscribing to my RSS feed

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

Everybody Hates Cold-Calling!

We will all try and avoid it, if we can. When business is tight and you have some time to spare (in business-speech, you have ‘over-capacity’!) cold-calling just might be the last-resort.

Get this though - most people really dislike cold-calling for one big reason: fear of rejection . We hate to be denied. It is a primal fear, for many of us. True enough, we might say it’s because we get nervous, or maybe we can’t get our words right, but underneath it all it comes down to this same issue. It’s no wonder that great tele-sales people are in demand, but much despised.

Nevertheless, at some point in your sales or freelancing career, you’ll have to grit your teeth and make that cold-call. I’ve found two great articles which give you the basics of getting going with cold-calling which I suggest you read now:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Simple-Ways-to-Improve-Your-Cold-Calling-Skills&id=1710428

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Make-That-Cold-Call&id=1810393

One last point I’d like to make. Back to that fear of rejection: a reality of using cold-calling to generate leads and business is you will be denied many more times that you will succeed. This is a fact. Even the most amazing cold-callers earning total mega-bucks face this fact too.

So here’s the trick.

When you’re starting out with cold-calling, begin by believing that every call will be denial, but by each call you’ll learn from it. Accepting the worst before you begin means that any success is a bonus. Have fun. Be human!

©2009 SimonStapleton.com. All Rights Reserved.

1. Brand You: how do you come across at work?

   Elizabeth Harrin writes a great post on her blog A Girls Guide to Project Management about personal branding in the workplace. She interviews Salma Shah who share her views on the importance and value of your personal brand, your ‘emotional fingerprint’ and asks what supermarket do you liken yourself as a brand?

2. Free Agents in the workforce

   An interesting view from Jeffrey Phillips on his blog Thinking Faster . He ponders the concept of the free agent, or what we might normally call a freelancer or contractor. He argues that freelancers are great for business because they add flexibility and are lower cost, overall. Business, though, won’t be controlling their talent in an oppressive way, I suggest, that binding employees into the organization offers. I wonder: will the future organization retain highly-skilled, core team members and then buy services from lower-skilled agents, or the other way around?

3. 7 Tech Innovations That Changed The World

An interesting collection of ‘innovations’ according to Diann Daniel at CIO.COM. First listed is RFID - eh? Maybe I missed somethin, but RFID hasn’t changed the world, yet. The rest of the list I do agree with!

4. How Uncle Sam Is Already Saving Money With IT

   Marianne Kolbasuk McGee on Information Week’s Government IT blog shares with us the investment in technology related spending by Obama’s administration. It’s great to see how billions of taxpayer dollars are being saved by information technology, creating work in the IT sector. Are their jobs delivering government projects in your area? 

5. Gen X, Gen Y and Baby Boomers Fight for Same IT Jobs

Cindy Waxer at CIO.COM writes that IT managers are facing a tough predicament: a head-on collision between two vastly talented and vastly different generations, both vying for full-time employment in a fast-shrinking economy.

6. Getting & Keeping IT Top Management’s Attention

I couldn’t write an another edition of Sh..IT Happens without covering an article by Dr Jim Anderson on his blog TheBusinessofIT. This time, Dr Anderson writes about the causes of neglect in an IT organization, leading to project failure. He shares the views of Jesper Simonsen who studies have shown that when senior IT management are involved in projects, projects perform much better because of the deeper involvement in decision making and problem solving. I think this is because many IT organizations haven’t got the principle of ‘empowerment’ quite right. Empowerment at lower levels gives IT workers the authority to make decisions and keep the wheels moving. In my opinion, senior IT managers need to have a strong control environment, but manage my exception. What Simonsen’s study tells us is that IT workers are not yet empowered enough and need the involvement of senior managers to progress projects. This is a conundrum. Do IT manager maintain their involvement, but restrict the empowerment of their subordinates, or do they hold back and let projects fail? These are the extremes, and the solution is in the middle. Perhaps more coaching and mentorship are the solutions… but who invests in coaching/mentorship in a recession? Well, the enlightened of course.

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