I was socialising with friends yesterday afternoon when all six of us were simultaneously struck down by the 'Sunday night blues'. Conversation turned to the week ahead, in particular, to the compensating factor of having a boss away from the office for a few days.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a few 'boss-free' days is good for stress-levels and therefore productivity and that this is true irrespective of whether that boss is 'good', 'bad', hard', 'soft' or whatever.
My boss is never out of the office. He always knows where I am and whether or not I've completed every task on my To Do List. He also knows whether or not I did the work properly or just went through the motions. In fact, there's no pleasing my boss.
I suppose this is why I'm still in business.
Yesterday I was invited to pitch to a new client. The opportunity arose because a woman I've worked with previously has just joined the company. So I arrived knowing that my bona fides were already established and, because my contact has an intimate knowledge of what I do, I assumed I was in the room because of an identified need that I might be able to address.
I was half-right.
Everyone agreed that they had an immediate need for the sort of training that I offer but it wasn't enough. Another larger, unarticulated issue loomed over the meeting and I struggled to identify it before we wrapped up. What they were looking for was a promise that my current products would help their sales teams succeed in ten years time regardless of any and all changes to the market, sales environment, team configuration or product mix. They wanted me to promise that my work was future-proof.
The best I could do was offer to work with them to define all these longer-term issues and then explore solutions. Perhaps some adaptation of what I currently offer will be what's needed but right now I don't know enough to make that promise. As I left it was clear that this wasn't what they wanted to hear.
Maybe the next supplier they see will be confident enough to promise them what they need. Or maybe he'll just all the right noises in order to get his foot in the door.
I'm not sure if I won or lost yesterday.
Recently I have done a few stand-up shows outside of London. Typically this means a car journey to East Grinstead or Taunton or wherever with other acts who are appearing on the same bill. Often the first time you meet another comic is on this drive out of town.
As it is not the 'done thing' to discuss the actual content of your set off-stage, you can spend hours in a car with another comic without gaining the slightest idea about the nature of his act; in fact until one of you takes the stage there is every chance that your jokes could be as good as identical. And given that many newer comedians draw their comic inspiration from similar sources this happens more often than might be supposed.
There is an exquisite, creeping sense of horror in being a hundred miles from home and hearing the act before you tilling a comedy field that you consider your own. It is both debatable and irrelevant as to whether it's better that the other guy gets laughs or not. Either way the audience has already gone where you planned to lead it and you will be seen as derivative.
As I've said before, this all happens because promoters rarely care what any individual act actually says; only that the combined length of their sets lasts the time the venue was promised.
This 'commodification of creativity' leads some performers to make strange, even extreme choices to ensure that they are seen as original. At the very least it forces a comic to have more than the minimum of material on any given night.
In his book Good to Great Jim Collins describes it as the flywheel effect. You know that moment when it suddenly feels like you're pushing against an open door, when you're pleasantly reminded that the customer doesn't need your permission to get excited about what you do?
Customers have been talking about me behind my back and it feels good.
I've had a frustrating few weeks in that my To Do list appears to be lengthening. The underlying reason for this is positive: clients requesting meetings and suchlike. What this means is that time that I had mentally allocated to some of my less urgent tasks has gone missing.
Working for yourself is not a hobby. If I can't maintain the discipline to push ahead on multiple fronts then I might as well go back to working for someone else.
We are going home to Australia for December for our first summer Christmas since 2004. And on Wednesday a client confirmed a job to be staged in mid-January 2009, a week or so after we get back to London. Knowing that I'm back in productive (paid) work so soon in the New Year makes the prospect of the break all that much sweeter.
This week I am starting work with a new client in a new country, something that is always exciting. Like most consultants I book my own travel but leave accommodation arrangements to the client as this saves me having to understand the geography of a strange city.
Having the client book the hotel also affords a subtle little window on how the project is being positioned internally:-
Better hotel = better positioning
I don't really care where I sleep so long as the room is clean, quiet and secure. However, because accommodation is one of those little decisions that is often made at quite a high level within a company, I will get that sinking feeling if I'm put up in a 3-star in the wrong part of town. If the client is trying to claw back a few euros on accommodation before the job has even started then my value proposition is under question.
I accept that I might be being paranoid. Maybe no one ever stays anywhere above 3-star, in which case my fears are unfounded. If not, then a very negative signal about the project is being communicated to the broader organisation in a very public way.
Peripheral signals like this are obviously an imperfect guide but still they have some value.
Despite what I
wrote a few weeks ago, the credit crunch is now having an effect on my business. Clients are taking longer and longer to pay me and using the gamut of institutional half-truths to explain the delay. For example, after a delay of a few weeks two separate clients have asked me to resubmit invoices for completed work quoting Purchase Order numbers that are mysteriously yet to be generated. And on several occasions I've been told that my (approved) invoice got into the system just
after the deadline for the next payment cycle.
Even so I'm better off than my larger competitors as I carry few overheads and employ no staff. So long as I can make the rent and pay the grocery bill I'm okay. If I did have staff I'd be obliged to pay them every week and by now I'd be deep into an overdraft and so at the mercy of my bank. Every pundit
emphasises the fact that the banks' smaller customers won't be getting any love any time soon.
As it is my company doesn't have an overdraft facility. In a
previous existence I learnt that once a business has access to credit it takes a lot of discipline not to become reliant on it. Famously Microsoft has always self-funded and keeps sufficient cash reserves to operate for an entire year without revenue (currently around $20
billion USD).
It's a pretty exciting time to be running a debt-free business.
There is no better way to sell something than for the customer sell it to himself. But this will never happen if the seller never shuts up. Like stand-up comics, salespeople shouldn't ever be afraid of a little silence.
If you're a client of mine then you're the most important thing in my world. Every last one of you.
A key reason for going with a smaller supplier is that the service should always be better. It is beholden upon me to be more attentive, more flexible and, well, friendlier than larger competitors. This is especially true with face-to-face meetings early on in the relationship.
Right now I have two potential new clients (one in the UK, the other in Europe) who have both requested high-level, multiperson meetings before December. Ignoring those dates where I have other commitments I'm only left with 17 days between now and November 30.
There is an art to drafting the email that implies: -
(a) My diary is entirely at your disposal so take as long you need...
But also: -
(b) Not really, so hurry up
My solution was to choose the client that I think is more likely to move quicker (based on the size of the meeting more than anything else). I emailed only her offering the choice of all 17 days. Happily I got a rapid response so could then immediately give the other client any of the other 16.
Reading back on this it seems like common sense but years ago I learnt the lesson the hard way when (my only) two potential clients insisted on a meeting on the same day. That cost me 50% of my customer base.
As I mentioned in a recent post, I've just come off a very busy period with lots of travel. I've been really looking forward to getting some time to myself to recharge, to think about the bigger picture and so on.
But...
I am at heart a freelancer. This means I am continually plagued by the thought that the last job I did is the last one I'll ever do and the ever-darker forebodings of the financial press haven't helped my mood in the slightest. So to say I was relieved when an email hit my BlackBerry last night confirming a large, interesting project that will run until mid-January is an understatement of the first order.
Being self-employed means continual, low-level anxiety about where the next job is coming from. Even if it's entirely subliminal I suppose that buried somewhere in my fee structure is the cost of that anxiety.
There's no doubt now that times are going to get a lot tougher over the coming few years and finding a place in the new world order will be no easy thing. For example, how many of my clients will be arguing hard for an 'external consultants budget' next year?
I'm thinking that some rebranding might be a place to start; am I better off describing myself as: -
Global Marketing Consultant
or: -
a freelance sales trainer?
Whatever it is, I am acutely aware that my biggest competitor is now the guy inside the client organisation desperate to make himself indispensable in the shadow of another restructuring.
On Facebook today and this advert came up on a side panel.
I know nothing at all about the Alchemy Network group and I'm sure that in amongst the 5 amazing, information packed days are some really valuable insights. My issue is with Selling Point 2: -
You will receive 12 months network support at NO cost
Whatever this is, it won't be as good as it sounds. I know that a lot of people like the idea of self-employment but because going out on your own is a daunting prospect they'd welcome some help along the way. We all need friends, right?
The truth is that if my business is failing then I can't see your 'network support' providing any meaningful help. It doesn't sound like you'll find me solid clients or arrange a competitive loan in a cashflow crisis or help with filing the tax return. And if I'm flourishing then you'll want me for marketing purposes more than I'll need you.
They say that 'success has a hundred fathers but failure is an orphan'. Why should I pay you to share (only) in my upside?
I have always been plagued by F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation that: -
'There are no second acts in American lives'
To me it sets out a particular challenge: how can you be successful at first one thing and then another in a single lifetime?
I'm talking about bona fide success here; not the mid-ranking executive who also sails competitively on the weekends or the lawyers who drop out and open that nice little B&B on the coast; not the sideline interest or the retreat from the world. I'm talking about building some remarkable career then stopping. Starting over from scratch and becoming remarkable again in some new way.
My travel schedule has settled down for the moment so I have two full weeks at home. The plan is to spend the time fleshing out some 'Next Act' ideas; another book and a different type of performance project.
If not now then when?
This week I was at a sales meeting and shared the stage with the client's new marketing director. It was a fractious affair, due mostly to the fact that Marketing had seen fit to change the overall strategy without sufficient consultation with Sales (according to Sales at least). The day morphed into one of those classic Sales versus Marketing scraps where every possible cliche was trotted out: -
- The 'ivory tower' or 'the trenches'
- Next month's budget or long-term success
- Day-to-day thinking or over-the-horizon vision
- The need for a cohesive positioning or doing whatever it takes to get the sale
I'd had peripheral involvement in the decision to change the strategy and believed that the underlying logic was sound. Still, the sales team was unconvinced.
The Marketing Director had confided in me beforehand that for him sessions like this one were about survival and nothing else, so when he stood up to speak the smell of fear was palpable. He spoke quickly and made no eye-contact with any of the fourteen or so sales managers in the room. Upon finishing he made to leave without Q&A but the sales guys were having none of it. Someone raised a hand, asked a reasonable question and that was that. Hunting as a pack the audience brutalised him for the next 45 minutes.
Did he survive? Sort of.
But what's the point? This guy has a strategy that I know he believes in and yet when placed in a room of the very people he depends on to enact that strategy his only thought is 'survival'. I suppose he left with his reputation intact (if diminished) but he hadn't done a thing to persuade his colleagues to do something he knows they must be doing to ensure everyone's long-term success.
I suppose that the 'survival' analogy comes from media politics. You agree to an interview with a Barbara Walters or a Jeremy Paxman because 'you should', it's how the game is played and so on. Yet once in the chair all you think about is getting out alive.
I can't speak for politicians but I know too many marketers who've watched too much West Wing and so see sales conferences in the same way. A chance to speak to the sales guys en masse is a 100% good thing. If you're not attempting to use the forum to excite and persuade and motivate then why are you even in your job?
Of course, as an 'external' my world is starker: if all I do is survive a session then I ain't going to be invited back.
I leave for Korea this afternoon. I'll get to Seoul on Tuesday night and begin work on Wednesday morning. All my documents are translated, printed and waiting at the hotel. The interpreter has been briefed and I'll meet her upon arrival. The pre-work is done and delivery awaits.
I hope that I've accounted for the differences so I can focus on enjoying the similarities.
Train-the-Trainer projects are an inevitable part of my world because my clients are mostly large enough to have their own training departments. This is an obvious point of tension and begs the question: what is the ideal relationship between the company-employed trainer and the external consultant?
As the external supplier, it is all too tempting to position myself as the genuine expert, an original thinker with a breadth of experience that affords insight to which a workaday wage-slave isn't privy. And in the past I've made the mistake of behaving as I was the 'A' team (if only because that's how the senior client team described me) and paid the price.
This is what I've learned: -
The internal training department will always be cheaper than me, more in tune with company politics than me and will be around to promote or destroy my project long after I've been paid. If I care about the long-term health of my brand then I need these people far more than they need me.
It never hurts to tell them as much. There will be enough whisperings in their collective ear saying that my presence is an indictment on their ability without me adding to any sense insecurity. Wherever possible Train-the-Trainer programmes should be positioned as meetings of equals rather than 'watch and learn' sessions.
Establishing a partnership of sorts with internal trainers is not always easy or even possible. But a good start to is park your ego at the door.
I flew home to London from Paris yesterday.
British Airways being British Airways we'd been put on a bus to get from the terminal to the actual aircraft. Me being me I'd let other people off the bus first, so I was the last passenger to board the (full) plane.
I was sitting in row 11, not at the front and not at the back and as I'd only been away overnight I just had the one carry-on bag. Of course there was no room remaining in the overhead compartments near row 11. Without a hint of an apology the cabin attendant told me that I had to find space further down the plane, somewhere near row 18. Now I'm faced with a choice: either I acquiesce (which means I'll be going against the flow to get my bag and pretty much be the last person off the flight) or I make a fuss.
So without actually raising my voice I make my displeasure known. This isn't right. Why should I potentially be the last person off the flight if I'm sitting in row 11? I turn my problem into the BA guy's problem. He reads the situation pretty well. He offers to stow the bag himself and bring it back to row 11 after we land. I can virtually hear the thoughts of my fellow passengers: -
"Pushy bloody Australian."
At Heathrow the cabin attendant is as good as his word, he brings me back my bag and I'm happy. Another passenger, who was obviously told the same thing as me when boarding, then asks that his bag be retrieved as well. It's too late: the seatbeat light is off, the aisles are suddenly full of passengers and he has to wait.
I don't like being that person. I hate having to make a fuss. I hate the whole idea that it's the 'squeaky wheel that gets the grease'. That if I don't behave badly and turn my problem into someone else's then I lose.
Systems that reward bad behaviour should be avoided. Unfortunately air travel is full of them.
I am sitting in an airport having just left a 'wrap-up' meeting at the conclusion of a very successful project. The client was effusive and immediately looking for new areas where we can work together. The problem is that the two projects where they next need external help don't match my skill set. I have three choices: -
- Take on a project and convince myself that I'll learn quickly enough to deliver what they need
- Take on a project and find a 3rd-Party supplier who will deliver the work to the client but on my behalf
- Explain that their needs fall outside of my competencies and decline the work
As tempting as the alternatives are I chose option 3. My personal brand is too valuable for me to try and improvise my way through a major project (option 1.)
It is option 2. that I want to explore here. If I really have my client's best interests at heart then I will either say nothing at all or I'll put him in touch with the right people and then get out of the way (which is what I did).
Still the temptation to manipulate proceedings so that everything goes through me is strong; if I bring buyers and sellers together then why shouldn't I get a piece of the action? This is what agents do for a living right? Essentially it's a version of what David Ricardo described as
rent-seeking: -
The extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity
I am not saying that this is a bad thing per se, it just doesn't fit my business model. I am no good at turning up to meetings where I don't have a specific role, which is what agents essentially do. Also, I want my value proposition to be based on what I know rather than who. Finally, it would place my reputation for quality entirely in the hands of others.
Some would say that I'm possibly 'leaving money on the table' but at least I know my personal brand is protected and that is worth a lot more to me in the longer term.
Each off us is going to have clients citing 'financial meltdown' as the reason to pull back from projects. Despite working with the pharmaceutical industry, a sector mostly governed by different market forces, I have already had 1-2 clients make noises to this effect.