Working the market and the opportunities as a self-employed individual

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Lots of reasons for that, which I won’t go into details with now.

What I really wanted to do was touch on a subject, we have all become painfully aware of: The financial crisis. Lots of people see a lot of challenges in that, but it can also spell opportunity for many. Opportunity to go solo for instance.

If you want to quit your job for instance, now may be as good a time as ever. Because, as futurist Anne Skare Nielsen told me the other day, you can blame it on the financial crisis now. You won’t look like a leftover or anything. You’re just the innocent victim of the circumstances. And thus free to move on.

I think she has got a great point. If you’ve always dreamed about going solo, what are you really waiting for?

Yesterday, I was reminded of a fact that I know I often unintentionally seem to forget, and which I think a lot of you out there might do too: Managing expectations with the people who really matter to you.

I have been blazing away in my role with Microsoft for the last couple of weeks. There has been heaps and heaps of work to get done combined with having to settle in to all the procedures once again. And boy, has Louise, my wife, noticed.

She was wary from the start about this new adventure fearing a deja vu from the last time I worked thee, and yesterday she cried foul. She felt she saw to little of me, and her belief that this time around it would be different was at an all time low.

This is a stark reminder to me. Because I got her onboard saying that this time it would be different. And I plan it to be. I have had a lot of very open hearted discussions with my manager about it, and we agree on how to solve it. We have just not really gotten there yet.

Of course Louise don’t see this. She’ll have to trust me on it. And trust is not easy when I say one thing and act in another. I need to get back to managing the expectations right. So I have asked her to give me a couple of months and then have the discussion. I have promised her that this time around it really will be different, and now I have to go and prove it.

The point? Remember to manage expectations correctly with the people closest to you. Because its when those are not aligned that it truly feels like a kick in he teeth. And that hurts.

I am having my first meeting with whom I hope will be my future accountant on Thursday this week. Yes, I have decided that the time has come to stop managing everything myself and actually buying myself some professional expertise and advice.

In reality it’s a luxury problem. Because I am only doing this because my business has grown to a scale this year, where I live in constant fear of cheating myself simply because I don’t know all the rules and regulations and how to make them work best for my advantage and my company. And that’s not a nice feeling.

A lot of self-employed people have said to me that the money for an accountant is the best money, they have ever spent on their business. I am keen to discover for myself, whether that’s true.

The fabolous team doing the filestoring and -sharing cloud-application Dropbox have ended their beta and opened the doors to the public.

I can only recommend that you go to their site and sign up straight away, because Dropbox is one of the best - if not the best - cloudresiding applications, I have ever tried. In short it allows you to store your documents in the cloud and access them from any machine at all in a folder-like way. The execution is just so brillant and clean, and it works so seamless that you just want to sit down and shed a quiet tear. It’s that beautiful.

The team celebrates by adding an upgrade possibility from the free 2GB storage to 50GB for a fee of 9,99 USD per month or 99,99 USD for a full year. That’s all the encrypted harddrive in the cloud you’re ever going to need.

Reading a blogpost by Ernst Poulsen this morning about the new ‘design’ on the Danish School of Media and Journalism and the hopelessness of it, I started thinking about how much you can criticize somebody else without fear of retaliation later on in a career sense.

Ernst’s very valid point was that often we don’t criticize someone, because we think about what would happen if we met the same person later in life, where perhaps we were the ones looking for a favor. But is it the right way to think?

As I said, I can definately understand the point. And I won’t say I haven’t been guilty of withholding something in the past out of fear of the longterm consequences. But I still think it’s wrong - but you need to approach criticism the right way.

I think it’s super important that you keep it constructive. That you really say, why it is you think that the criticism is valid. If not for any other reason then to make it possible for yourself to admit, you were wrong (if it turns out you were) and make a gracious retreat.

The key word here is integrity. Because if you criticize with integrity, people may disagree, but most of them will still respect you for sticking with you gun. And in my experience respect and proven integrity are better drivers for long term opportunity than being spineless or scared.

The issue of having multiple sites is to know when to update which site and with what. It’s just so easy to let one site suffer, even though that really wasn’t your intention.

I have had that issue with my personal English website, 030176.com. I updated in bursts and found that that was good - but also discovered the pain when there was too far between regular updates.

Well, I think I have solved that now. The solution is called Sweetcron and it’s a free-for-all lifestream aggregator, you install on your server and use to aggregate the updates you make on blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter…whatever really.

It even presents it in a nice way, and I have to be honest and admit that the format makes me get lifestreaming. It’s actually fun to look back and see what I was thinking about, what I was shooting pictures of etc. etc. And this without feeling bad about not updating the site per se.

As a self-employed individual going back every once in a while and browse the archives can help you to understand why you did, what you did, when you did it - and what you got out of it. In that way it’s not only a lifestreamer - it’s also a meaning aggregator. Hopefully at least.

There seems to be a general consensus that the real differentiator between succesful consultants, experts et al and the not so succesful ones is a common ingredient: The secret sauce.

The secret sauce it what makes you stand out from the rest. It’s what you personally add to the equation. It’s why people choose to hire you for a project rather than somebody else.

I find the idea of a secret sauce somewhat counterintuitive in this day and age, where all the pretty speech among the digital digerati focuses on sharing, openness etc. Is it only me, or do you find it funny/strange too?

If I have a secret sauce, I think its a combination of being able to dig into complex issues and spot and create clarity and develop clear idea of where to go next from there. That and my ability to build personal relations based on mutual respect.

In the spirit of openness, what’s your secret sauce?

Being self-employed you’re often presented with many very interesting opportunities. And just like going out when you’re not single, all the interesting opportunities have a way of presenting themselves, when you’re up to your ears in interesting stuff anyway.

In other words it’s time to make a choice. But what do you go with? Head or gut? How do you choose and maximize the opportunity for making a correct decision while conversely minimizing the risk of making a wrong one?

Honestly, I don’t know. So if you have got any advice to share, please do so in th comments.

Actually, I could need it right now. Because I’m stuck in this dilemma. On one hand I have got an incredible opportunity to take up a new position and work on a passion project of mine. On the other hand I have an equally incredible opportunity to build something brand new and exciting for the longer term together with real cool and fun people. And it’s really hard deciding what to go for.

What would you do, if you were me?

Chris Brogan had a good post the other day about what it means to be a vendor to someone else as opposed to a partner. It was kind of thought provocing to me, because it underlined that while there certainly are significant differences in how you should be thinking and applying your trade, the real difference can be very small.

For my own part I choose to think of the people and companies I work for as partners. Now why do I do that? Because I like to see us as striving together to reach a common goal. That’s what partners do. At least in my book.

The challenge is that while I and the other side may see us as partners, I am in reality treated as - a vendor. This means that I have the same expectations on me as other vendors would have, and I just take my place in the rank and file of vendors doing various things for the person or company in question. It’s not about a common goal anymore. It’s about me fulfilling a task.

I don’t mind solving tasks for others and get paid to do so. Far from it. But I don’t understand why we need to have the partner discussion, if it’s a vendor they are looking for? Why not just cut to the chase and call it what it really is: A supply-demand relationship?

It would certainly simplify thinking and acting as a vendor.

Always being online can be a serious distraction for many people. But if you’re self-employed, time spent not being efficient is potentially money being lost. And that’s bad.

There is a lot of advice, you could choose to follow. And we do. But quite often we cheat. So in order to make it harder for ourselves to do things, we shouldn’t be wasting our time on, we need something more hardcore.

Enter Freedom. It’s a great little free app for the Mac that lets you effectively kill your online connection for a period of time that you choose. You cannot surf, you cannot mail, you cannot be on IM or Facebook. You’re offline and thus you might as well get some real work done.

It’s absolutely brillant. Advice is great. But tools that really help are just so much better.