Nine lessons from nine years on my own (part one)

Your first client is already on your list. You just haven't written the list yet.

Today’s issue was supposed to be drafted before I left on holiday. But, coulda shoulda woulda and it wasn’t. The week before a holiday eats everything, which is a lesson in itself, just not for today.

So I’m writing it here instead, in a chair facing the water at the very top of Portugal, where the river meets the sea.

This is what unwinding looks like for me nowadays: an hour or two of work a day, no calls. Nine years of working for myself and that’s as far as I’ve got with the concept of a holiday.

I started in January 2017. The company didn’t exist until July. Sitting here I counted up what those nine years actually taught me and came out with nine lessons. I’m still getting several of them wrong. Bookkeeping is the clean example. I outsourced it last year, eight years in. It should have happened in year three.

You can read someone else’s mistakes and skip the personal cost. But you and I know that some of this only goes in properly when it happens to you. So read them anyway, the odds improve.

Five today. Four next Wednesday.

Quote of the Week

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

Michael Porter, “What Is Strategy?”, Harvard Business Review, 1996

1. Your first client is already on your list

At the start your entire business development function is a short list of people who have already seen you work. They know what you’re good at because they watched you do it, and one of them has a problem you could solve with your eyes closed.

My first client had worked with me at UBS five years before I started. Several years of no contact. Trust doesn’t expire on the schedule you assume it does.

That’s the whole mechanism at the beginning. You’re writing down names, and in B2B you can probably count them on one hand.

You only need one of them to say yes. One client and you’re in business.

2. What got you your first client won’t get you your tenth

That first list is finite and you’ll work through it faster than you expect.

Then comes the harder version of the same job. Finding people who have never seen you work, and building a way of doing this that runs on a schedule, whether you feel like it or not.

The trap is that you’ll be busy delivering excellent work for the clients you already have, which is the most enjoyable thing and the easiest to defend as a use of a day. Meanwhile the finding of the next client quietly stops happening.

At the beginning you sell to people who already trust you. After that you build the trust first, which takes longer and can’t be done in the gaps between client work.

3. You priced the delivery and forgot the job

When you set your price, you price the work you can see. The hours in front of the client. The work you were paid a salary for right up to that moment.

What you don’t price is everything that has to exist for that work to happen at all. The accounting. The CRM you’ll set up badly and rebuild twice. Your own invoicing, your own travel. The proposal that took two full days and went nowhere. Sales, which used to be somebody else’s function two floors away, and is now a whole Tuesday.

In a corporate job every one of those was another person’s role and another person’s budget. You never had to cost them because they were invisible. Now they’re all on your desk, and not one of them is in your number.

Year one, you won’t hire for any of it. Fine. The problem is pricing as though none of it exists, then wondering why a full week produced so little money.

4. You can’t be all things to all people

Early on you’ll say yes to work you don’t love. Take it. Being in business beats being right about your positioning, and the theory of your ideal client is worth nothing next to an invoice.

The hard part arrives later. Work comes in from people who will pay you. They may even pay you on retainer. And you turn it down, because the price sits below what you believe your work is worth, and because taking it would eat the capacity you need for the work that pays properly.

I’ve done that and I still find it uncomfortable. The money on the table is real but the opportunity cost is invisible at the moment you decide.

There’s always a voice that says: I could still do that. You could. If your day had 48 hours, you could do all of it.

Saying no means retiring a version of you that was real and that people still ask for. You’re turning down who you used to be, on purpose, before you’re certain the next version pays better.

5. Outsource before you’re ready

One function off your desk, paid out of the business account.

I know exactly what I’m asking, because I took eight years to do it with my own books. Every one of those hours in a spreadsheet was an hour I wasn’t spending in front of somebody who might hire me.

The invoice for a bookkeeper is easy to see. The revenue you never went out and got doesn’t show up on any statement, which is why the maths feels wrong right up until you run it properly.

Treat it as buying capacity. Money goes out of the business and time comes back into it.

Own it

If you haven’t left corporate yet, the biggest fear is that there’ll be nobody to sell to. That you hand in your notice and find out your reputation only ever existed inside that building.

It doesn’t. The people who have watched you work know exactly what you’re good at. That’s a list of names, and you already have it.

So write it down. Before Sunday. Every person who has seen your work up close and would take your call. Names on paper, no editing while you write. If you’re already in business, do it anyway. The list you made in year one is out of date and you know it.

Ten minutes. Then count them.

If you’ve already started your own thing: what did you outsource first, and how late were you? Tell me you didn’t wait eight years like me. I’d like to know it’s possible.

And if you’re still inside: how many names are on your list? Which one would you be embarrassed to call, and what exactly is the embarrassment about?

Hit reply. I read every single one.

Next Wednesday, lessons six to nine, including how you actually get the money out of the client and into your account. And now, back to my holidays.

See you Wednesday,

Claudia