Category Archives: Entrepreneurship Journal

Entrepreneurship Journal, 1/31/2016

New Client

I realized today that a couple weeks ago I achieved a goal I had been trying to achieve since about four and a half years ago. I’ve grown and improved so much in that time that the achievement of the goal just seemed like such a natural event in the course of going about my life that it didn’t even register as something worth thinking about until weeks after it had happened.

My goal was to get a client that would give me a steady stream of work into the indefinite future and would also be okay with something less than 40 hours a week. Naively, I didn’t even set this as a goal when I first started freelancing. I knew so little that I just assumed that I could arrange such a thing for myself without any special work required to make it happen. Boy, was I wrong. Not only did it not happen effortlessly, it took four and a half years to do it!

The exact form that the fulfillment of my goal has taken is that I’m doing Ruby on Rails work for an agency in NYC that has an explicit 35ish-hour work week for its full-time employees, and is totally okay with 25 hours a week for its contractors. They share my opinion that it’s actually counterproductive for someone to work too many hours in a week, and that you reach the “too many hours” mark well before 40 hours. This is an opinion that’s presently not very widely held and even fairly controversial. I find this silly because to me it’s so obviously true. Anyway, I’m very grateful to have finally found a client who shares my belief and to have a relationship with them. For anyone wanting to duplicate my experience, I wish I had some secret to share, but I don’t. My best advice is to market yourself aggressively and have as many conversations with as many prospective clients as you can. This will increase your “luck surface area” and increase the chances that among the prospects you talk with lies a prospect who is good with a work week of fewer than 40 hours. (And of course, if the client is a guest client, your weekly workload is entirely up to you.)

I’m still contracting on the side with the client who I was working for as a W2 employer for a number of months. That’s going fine.

Destination vs. journey

I’ve been thinking more lately about the destination vs. journey. I’m realizing more and more that there’s no such thing as “arrival”. You never “make it” and then feel all set. Therefore it’s vitally important for me not to subordinate the quality of my day to day life to some expected future result. So I’m thinking about how I can be more present and alive right now rather than to have complete focus on the future. The future, of course, never gets here. It’s always the present, and if you’re always wishing you were in the future and not living in the present, you’re never really fully living. That’s a sad way for a person to live a life, although I think it’s probably the way a lot of people operate. I certainly spent years operating this way. To an extent I still do, although I’ve been dialing it down for some time now.

I’ve also been thinking lately that maybe there’s no meaning or purpose in anything except the meaning or purpose you give it. I used to evaluate every activity based on whether it was a means to a worthy end. For example, reading a book about how to retire at age 30 is a means to a worthy end, but washing the dishes isn’t, because washing the dishes doesn’t really “move you forward” at all. But now, as I think about how I might spend my time after I free myself of the need to work for money, I’m wondering if there’s much of a significant difference between painting a painting and doing the dishes. As long as I can learn to enjoy the activities I’m performing, does it really matter what the activity is? And if I can learn how to enjoy any activity, do I really have to wait to unlock some achievement before I feel like I can start enjoying life in general? These thoughts are synthesized from the ideas I took from two books I recently read, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The former is full of voodoo but has some messages worth hearing, and the latter is just pure fucking gold and I can’t wait to read it again.

Entrepreneurship Journal, 1/19/2016

BNI

In December 2014 or January 2015 I visited a BNI group which I intended to join at the time but never got around to doing. I finally got around to visiting again last Wednesday. They gave me an application which I filled out. I’m going to the next weekly BNI meeting tomorrow where I expect to pay my dues and become a full-fledged member.

When I had visited this BNI about a year ago I was doing so as a guest of a friend. I believe I only visited twice. It’s a pretty well-understood fact in business networking that it’s a process of farming, not hunting. You have to plant seeds over time and then reap the harvest months or years later. I’ve understood this fact for a while which is why I found it surprising that I landed a new client, and a very high-quality client at that, on my very first meeting to that BNI group, if I recall correctly. (If not the first, it was the second.)

It was surprising enough that this happened once. When I re-visited the group last Wednesday, another member of the group approached me after the meeting about the possibility of enlisting my services. I’m scheduled to meet with one of his people tomorrow afternoon. This kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen. I attribute this good fortune partially to luck, but also to having developed a marketing message that people can easily understand. My message is that I help businesses that use Excel reduce or eliminate the manual work they perform that’s associated with Excel. There’s something about this message that I find unwieldy, and I intend to smooth it out somehow, but it does appear to work in its current form.

Changing client relationships

Around July 2015 I started working for an agency that an old boss and friend of mine was working for. By a process I won’t discuss here, I ended up as a W2 employee in September. Over time it became less and less of a fitting relationship, and so last Friday I went back to being a contractor. I’m leaving out a lot here that wouldn’t be in good taste to discuss publicly.

I’m scheduled to start working with another client in mid-February. This leaves an interesting three-and-a-half-week gap which is too small to fill with new client work, but too big not to. Luckily I think there’s probably some work I can do for my “old” client during that time. And if not, oh well. I won’t die. (This is the lens through which I view most risks, much to my wife’s consternation.)

Grand Rapids Excel Meetup

My original goal for the Grand Rapids Excel Meetup was to get 15 people at the first meeting. Right now I have 14 people RSVP’d on meetup.com as well as a few who have said they plan to come but haven’t RSVP’d on the site. I don’t know what kind of actual attendance that will translate to.

I was also planning to send out a mailing to advertise the meetup. Turns out I don’t have enough money right now to both join BNI and advertise the meetup. I decided it was more important to me to join BNI that to send out the mailing.

Product endeavors

I’ve made a conscious decision not to try to brainstorm up a product business idea. My strategy instead is to put myself in situations where I’ll naturally stumble upon a business idea. Not long after I made this decision, an old friend approached me with a certain product business idea that put through my filters and judged to be an idea worth pursuing. I don’t like to “cackle before I lay the egg” so I won’t talk about it much or get my hopes up too much until more develops. What I will say is that the other guy would sell the product and I would build it, so like a CEO/CTO relationship. My original goal was to be the CEO of something, the #1 guy, but I also recognize that that’s a secondary matter. The important part of my goal to become a millionaire by age 35 is the million dollars, not the mechanics of how I earn the money. Anyway, the ball is in the other guy’s court right now and there’s not a lot I can do I this point but wait. I don’t mind waiting, though. I have a whole three years and three weeks until I turn 35. You can earn a million bucks in three years, right?

Entrepreneurship Journal, 12/23/2015

In my last update I mentioned having started something called Grand Rapids Excel Meetup as a lead generation method. My plan was and is:

  1. Establish a venue for the meetup and an initial meeting date
  2. Promote the first meeting on social media, and by reaching out directly to people who I think might be interested
  3. Write a sales letter and mail it to local accountants, banks, and maybe other types of businesses likely to use Excel
  4. Call those same businesses to invite their owners/employees to come to the first meeting

I’ve done step 1 and I’ve done step 2 to about the extent that I’m going to. My target was to have at least 15 people at the first meeting. Right now I have 15 members in the group with 10 RSVPs. I’m pleasantly surprised that the numbers are so high with what little promotion I’ve done so far. There are also a few other people who have told me they’re planning to attend and haven’t RSVP’d on meetup.com.

I wrote a sales letter a week or two ago. I came back to the sales letter, re-read it, thought, “What the hell was I thinking?!” and completely re-wrote it. I checked the re-written version today and only found one small part I didn’t like. I’ll probably go with the version I have now after I make that small modification. I’ll probably send the first round of mailings on the week of January 4th, and then do a round of mailings every week until the first meeting on January 27th.

How I read so many books

This is the list of books I’m reading right now:

  • Endless Referrals by Bob Burg
  • The Lost Art of Finding Our Way by John Edward Huth
  • The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
  • Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman
  • The History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer
  • Abundance by Peter Diamandis
  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

It might seem silly that I’m reading so many books at once. It probably is in fact silly that I’m reading quite so many books, but I do have kind of a system which I think makes sense. This system has allowed me to read as many as 30 or more books a year. 30 books a year isn’t savant-level or anything but it’s a lot more than most people read.

My system is something I guess I’ll call my Reading Station System. My “stations” include:

  • Next to my bed
  • Living room
  • The kids’ room
  • The car
  • “On the go”, meaning I keep a book with me at all times

I’ll explain the last first. Lately I’ve been keeping my stuff in a backpack in which I keep my laptop, a folder with a notepad and pen, headphones, and a book. Whenever I meet someone for lunch I bring my book into the restaurant and read it while I wait for the other person. At doctors’ appointments, at the post office, and other places where I expect to wait, I bring a book so rather than being bored I can use that time to educate myself. Most people just sit there and let that time be wasted. There’s no good reason for that.

The car is a pretty simple one. I listen to books on Audible. I usually alternate between books and podcasts. When I run out of podcast episodes that really speak to what I’m thinking about at the time, I’ll switch over to my audiobooks. I sometimes alternate between two audiobooks if I’m trudging through something long and dry (like the 45-hour A History of Western Philosophy) but I’m working on breaking that habit by selecting audiobooks that are short and interesting, and saving the dry stuff for print.

Putting the kids to bed at night is my job. We usually read one or two short picture books and then turn out the lights switch to a children’s novel on the Kindle which can be lit up. Right now we’re reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. We just finished The Call of the Wild and before that we read Where the Red Fern Grows. After the kids fall asleep I switch to a book of my own. Right now the Kindle book I’m reading is the monstrous The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (920 pages on paperback).

The book I keep next to my bed is The Lost Art of Finding Our Way, which is a book about primitive navigation techniques. (I’m bad with directions and I’m trying to fix that.) I try not to read anything too technical or work-oriented before bed because I don’t want to get the wheels spinning before I try to fall asleep.

The book I keep in the living room right now is Endless Referrals. I usually have a higher ratio of business books to non-business books but for a couple reasons I have it flipped right now. Fiction is always a small slice of the pie.

I’m a slow reader but by “filling in the cracks” of my life with reading I’ve found that I can read up to about four books a month.

Entrepreneurship Journal, 12/13/2015

Last time I wrote, I was thinking of going further down the Microsoft Excel positioning path. The idea is that I find businesses that use Excel in a somewhat wasteful way, and transform their clunky old Excel-based system into an elegant web application.

I have in fact gone further down this path. My friend Adam and I started something we’re calling Grand Rapids Excel Meetup. The idea is that we’ll bring together people who use Excel and work and let them talk shop with each other and exchange tips and tricks. And if they feel like maybe they’ve outgrown Excel, we’ll let them know that they can talk to us about that.

I’ve been thinking that the positioning could be narrowed even further by specifically targeting accountants. I shared this idea with a friend of mine and he referred to me an accountant he knows. I talked with this accountant on the phone, and not only was he interested in the Excel meetup, but he mentioned that he had some automation work he’d like to talk to me about. Another friend of mine told me the CFO where he works was excited about the meetup, although that CFO lives in Chicago and can’t come. But it’s good to know that an Excel meetup seems to be an idea people are into.

I’ve also been putting out the feelers pretty hard for regular old web development projects of any kind. That’s going pretty well and I have 14 leads right now of varying degrees of size and quality. I even got to the point in one of those conversations where the prospect agreed to send a deposit, although it hasn’t been sent yet. The nice thing is that right now I don’t need any extra work, I just want it. This of course allows me to be more selective in what client engagements I accept and under what terms.

I guess I’ll close with some books I’m reading right now:

  • Endless Referrals by Bob Burg
  • The Lost Art of Finding Our Way by John Edward Huth
  • The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
  • Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman
  • The History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer (on audio)
  • Abundance by Peter Diamandis (on audio)
  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

As you can see I’m on kind of an ancient history kick right now. I had read a Napoleon biography some time ago and Napoleon was a big Alexander the Great fan, so that made me curious about old A-dawg. I find it interesting that Alexander was taught by Aristotle who was taught by Plato who was taught by Socrates. I don’t really know anything about any of those guys. Maybe next I’ll study Socrates, then Plato, then Aristotle, so I can learn about the earliest guys first.

It might seem silly that I read so many books at once. There’s a good reason which I’ll explain in a separate post.

Entrepreneurship Journal, 11/13/2015

Since I read The Positioning Manual I’ve been branstorming and researching various markets/niches.

My aim has been to find a market that’s conducive to both consulting engagements and a product. For example, hair salons wouldn’t fit both because almost no hair salon is going to hire a developer for a one-off consulting engagement. Most of them don’t have that kind of money.

On the other hand, I could imagine, say, manufacturing companies being a better fit. I could very easily imagine a manufacturing company that would see an ROI in hiring a developer for a one-off engagement, and have the money to pay for it.

Unfortunately I’ve found it hard to arbitrarily pick a market. I tried thinking of all the kinds of businesses I’ve already worked for. I got a couple ideas out of that but they were still a little too vague. For example, I worked for a trucking logistics startup. I researched that industry a little bit and couldn’t figure out a way to try to come at it.

I went relatively deep into a couple industries by subscribing to podcasts, trade magazines, email lists, etc. I hoped that by educating myself in these ways I’d be able to figure out a way to try to make some inroads into that industry. I haven’t been able to figure anything out.

Funnily enough, I actually had tried to position my consulting business before, I just don’t know if I called it positioning. At one point I called it my Unique Selling Proposition (USP). My first attempt at positioning was real estate. Just like the markets I’ve researched recently, I researched real estate and even talked to a few people in that industry, but couldn’t figure out how to get in. I went without any positioning for some time after that. Late I came up with a positioning statement that actually seemed to work.

Somehow I came up with the idea of selling my services not as software development but as “business process automation”. I think I got this idea from Dan Kennedy’s advice to put yourself into a “category of one”. Another thing that helped push me in this direction was that I would go to Chamber of Commerce meetings and tell people I was a software engineer, and they would either not understand or not care or both. So I knew I needed to come up with something that non-technical people could understand.

What I used to say at the Chamber meetings was, “I do business process automation. I take things that are tedious, time consuming and expensive and make them cheap, easy and enjoyable. I do this by writing custom software. A good referral for me is a business that uses Microsoft Excel. If you’re using Excel, there’s a good chance that means you’re either wasting a bunch of your own time or using up a bunch of payroll expense.”

I was using this same pitch in a BNI meeting and the guy sitting next to me actually tapped me on the shoulder and basically said, “Hey, that’s me. Maybe we should talk.” He ended up being a client. One of my favorite clients ever, in fact.

I don’t believe I ever got any work out of the Chamber that way. Eventually I got busy with client work and stopped going. But this morning I got an email from someone I had talked to several months ago about a certain Excel project and she was interested in reopening her conversation. The funny thing is that a couple days ago, I was actually wondering, “You know, maybe instead of trying to arbitrarily come up with a vertical niche, I should just keep going with my horizontal niche that has already worked a little bit.” This email from my old Chamber contact has given me a little bit more encouragement in that direction.

I might chance my mind again soon but I think right now I’ll try going a little further down the Excel path. But instead of telling people I do “business process automation”, I think I’ll just come right out and say “I turn Excel into software.” I should probably say something more like, “I save businesses money by turning Excel systems into custom software.” I’ll probably test a number of pitches and see how they’re received. I can definitely thank Philip Morgan for the idea to make my narrow focus (business process automation) even narrower (Excel). I can see people grasping the Excel thing a lot more readily than business process automation.

I’m not sure what exactly I want to prioritize next. I think I want to rewrite my website copy, get new business cards, and start going to business networking groups again. The business networking groups can really put a squeeze on the ol’ schedule.

I’m actually trying to pick up a little side work over the next couple months, so if I’m successful in doing that like I hope I’ll be, I probably won’t actually be doing much to work “on” my business during that time just because I’ll be so busy.

Entrepreneurship Journal, 10/31/2015

I won’t be doing Snip updates anymore since I killed Snip, although I do still want to keep people updated on the progress of my entrepreneurial journey. I’ll call my new updates my “Entrepreneurship Journal”. I’ll shoot for making them weekly but it’ll probably end up being more random than that.

This time around I want to optimize for least frustration. What I’d like to do is find a certain niche where I can start off doing consulting, then over time shift over to selling a product in that area. For example, right now I’m doing a consulting engagement for a magazine where I’m replacing their Excel-based system with a web application. After this I could conceivably do the same thing for another magazine, then another. Over time I could collect the common parts of what I’ve done for each client, and instead of selling just a consulting engagement, I could sell a consulting engagement that’s built on top of a product. Then eventually I’d just sell the product.

So right now I’m researching niches. I want to avoid what happened with Snip where I spent almost 18 months between the time I started working on the business and the time I made my first dollar. I figure if I start off with consulting engagements in my niche, then the worst case is I will have done some consulting and made some money.

What I’m researching right now is solar. If anyone knows anyone in the solar industry, and intro would be greatly appreciated.

By the way, a lot of this niche thinking is thanks to a really good book I read recently called The Positioning Manual for Technical Firms by Philip Morgan. If you’re a freelancer I’d consider it a must-read.