An Australian mate was in town this week so Katy and I went along to a dinner with a bunch of his London friends, none of whom we'd met previously.
I was sat next to a woman who immediately declared she'd just started her own events company. She went on to say that she'd worked in the industry for years as a freelancer before starting her own business. I spent much of the evening trying to understand her distinction between 'freelancing' and 'self-employment'.
I think she was describing the transition from price-taking to price-setting. Freelancers provide something commodity-like ("We need a photographer for the shoot") whereas self-employment is about building a brand ("We're getting Mario Testino").
So whilst all freelancers are self-employed, not all self-employed people see themselves as freelancers.
It's not yet dawn on Tuesday and I'm back at the all-too-familiar BA Lounge wondering if / when they'll cancel my flight to Oslo.
I'm delivering a 1-dayer to a new team and because yesterday's flight didn't happen, the earliest I'll make it to the meeting is 11am. I'll have lost over two hours of meeting time so my value proposition has already been compromised. Part of me wants the flight to be pulled so that we can reschedule and I can get / give the client the full day as sold in. But the earliest they can reconvene the meeting is May and in these straitened times too much can happen between then and now.
I have to want this job to happen today and I have to deliver as promised, regardless of the compromises
At least I'm aware of what's going on. A lot of smaller businesses are under unspoken pressure to willfully ignore the compromises (time, budget, deadlines) and simply say 'Yes' to every sniff of work. The danger here is that the little guy gives his (larger) competitors the chance to claim he overpromises and underdelivers.
Unfortunately the only solution is to do more with less. Like I said, I have no option other than to turn up and deliver.
Like everyone else in Britain my plans for the day were rendered unfeasible by the worst snowfalls in 18 years. Right now I'm supposed to be boarding a flight for Oslo but Heathrow is closed for the day. Perhaps I'll have better luck tomorrow but somehow I doubt it.
So I've spent much of the day dealing with two suppliers: my travel agent and my printer-cum-courier. Given that I have longstanding 'account managers' within both companies I thought that each understood my business pretty well; that I'm self-employed and that if I'm not working I'm not getting paid. I need to be delivering a programme in Oslo tomorrow*.
The travel agent kicked into gear immediately. They checked direct flights out of every possible airport and then every conceivable permutation of European connections. It was all to no avail because the UK has closed up shop for the day and quite possibly the week. Still, when I spoke to my client I could honestly say that I'd left no stone unturned in trying to make tomorrow's meeting.
Su problema, mi problema
The printer was less helpful. They had assembled a pile of documents I need for the meeting but they couldn't get them to me as we couldn't find a mutually convenient drop-off point. The overwhelming impression was that it was all too hard. In the end they simply declared that they couldn't help me and that I'd better arrange my own courier service. This despite the fact that after
a well-publicised 2004 merger they are arguably the best-known courier company around.
Su problema, su problema
It's all easy on the easy days. It's on the hard days that we need help.
* And take a moment to imagine the guffaws from my Norwegian client when I said that Britain was closed on account of a 30cm snowfall...
Project momentum is a strange and wonderful thing. That moment when you start getting disproportionate reward for your effort. Similar I suppose to what Jim Collins referred to in Good to Great as the flywheel effect.
Collaboration requires momentum. It insists that the output of the team be greater than the input of the individual team-members. Otherwise, why collaborate at all? A lot of this year's big projects will take shape in the next month, especially the performance-based ones.
Exciting times.
Seth Grodin on professionalism. I flatter myself in seeing this as another angle on what I was talking about recently.
Professionalism has a different connotation in the world of stand-up comedy. You're doing a 'professional gig' when you get paid (when you're starting out this happens rarely). You get to call yourself a 'professional stand-up comic' when your comedy pays your bills. Every professional comic I know brands themselves thus with pride:-
I made it. I turned my dream into a reality. I get paid to do something I love doing
I suppose that this is the stuff of modern life: to be the guy who followed his dreams. Still, I'm reminded of a quip made by Marko Mustac, a good friend and an amazing performer and director of improv theatre: -
If you want to get amateurs to behave properly you accuse them of being 'unprofessional'
Works every time. Just don't try it on actual professionals.
I'm working in Helsinki this week. It's a two-day follow-up on a sales skills programme I delivered in August last year and I've been given all of Monday and Tuesday to work with the team.
This begs what may seem like a stupid question: -
How long is two days?
When designing a programme I usually work to a schedule of 830am to 530pm: 7 hours of work + 1 hour for lunch + 2 x 30 minutes for coffee. So a two-day programme should mean that I roughly have 13 hours to work with (I allow 30 minutes a day for latecomers, birthday cakes, senior managers dropping in to 'say a few words' and participants mysteriously booked out on earlier flights).
I get nervous when my usable time drops much below 6 hours / day. Not only is it harder to deliver financial value (I charge a day-rate) but also my programmes are like stories that take a while to tell and aren't helped by rushing. At a pinch I can take you on a 13 hour journey in 11 hours.
So when my Finnish client blithely told me that we'd be starting at 9am and finishing at 430pm I got worried, especially as her team has no real culture of punctuality. And although there's a temptation to finish later on Monday and start earlier on Tuesday I have to account for the fact that some participants got up long before 5am in a Nordic mid-winter to make it for the 9am start. My ability to deliver value drops to zero if my audience is weeping with exhaustion.
To address this I've shortened the programme, truncating some exercises and dropping others altogether. Now the problem is that I'm not delivering the product I sold in. As my client is the National Sales Manager I know that in her mind this programme equates to her team being 'off the road' for two whole days not some fraction thereof.
The same person is simultaneously taking away my hours and demanding I give her days!
Is there a solution? Maybe not a comprehensive one but the following are perhaps worth remembering: -
- Avoid Monday meetings. Many companies have a very sensible policy of not expecting staff to cut their weekend short and so a Monday meeting usually means early morning travel and a later start time
- The same goes for Friday afternoon finishes
- I don't kid myself that I'll make up all that much time with shortened breaks. Maybe I can get away with a 45 minute lunch break and 20 minutes for coffee but any less than that and my participants won't have time to get something to eat, use the bathroom and return those urgent calls. When every scheduled fifteen minute break legitimately takes twenty minutes I really look like I've lost control
- In as friendly a manner as possible I'm less tolerant of discussions going 'off-topic'. Save it for the breaks please
- Finally, I commit to delivering 7.5 hours of value regardless of the actual time I end up with
As I've said before, I don't think there's a lot of point complaining to the client to subtly lower expectations. In six weeks time all that anyone will remember is that the team was off the road for two days and what to what end?
Of late I've had a few dealings with UK's much-vaunted National Health Service (the 'NHS').
It is an amazing institution, set up in 1948 by the Attlee Labour Government to ensure that health care was available to every Briton 'free at the point of delivery'. Millions upon millions of words have been written for and against the NHS. It is rightly seen as a sort of national glue that protects against the health-driven inequities of the US. Equally it is described as a bloated and wasteful bureaucracy, said to be the second largest employer on the planet after the Chinese Red Army.
What I'd like to focus on is the word 'free'.
As a system, the NHS is only free in a monetary sense. And what the customer saves in pennies is extracted from him in time and frustration. It's in the system's interest to keep me waiting. It's also in the system's interest to have me wait in as uninviting an environment as possible, but that's perhaps a lesser point. It is not in the system's interest to treat me as a 'professional'; as someone whose time has a monetary value.
This is why we like dealing professionals, be they individuals or organisations. If there seems to be an unspoken awareness that your time has a value then you're probably in good hands.
I normally reserve my thoughts on politics for other places and other media but as this is what I woke up thinking at 530am on a cold and rainy Monday morning in London hopefully you'll indulge me.
It occurred to me this morning that perhaps the reason why the Global Financial Crisis doesn't yet seem as real and as nasty as it undoubtedly should is that at some level we've all been focused on something, someone, else.
Over the weekend I read that Obama's Inaugural Address tomorrow will be the most watched speech in history. So the question is this: -
How will we all feel on Wednesday?
As mentioned previously, 2009 is going to be my 'year of playing nicely with others'. I will be staging at least three different theatre / comedy shows and I've already started meeting with potential collaborators. And already there's frustration: meetings postponed at short notice, late starts and no-shows.
It's vital that ground rules are lain down early where 'creative' projects are concerned, especially where the relationship is supposed to be a collaboration of equals. Otherwise a strange version of 'enabling' (in the addiction therapy sense) can take hold.
I've been a comedy performer of sorts for 20 years. In that time I've had any number of really talented writing and performing partners. Many of them frankly more talented than me. Yet it's rare that they're as organised as I am and therein lies the rub. The dynamic becomes one where I'm looking after more and more of the practical aspects of the project and my partner's role is just to turn up with the funny.
This damages me because I slip into a quasi-stage manager / producer role. The relationship becomes an asymmetric one where I'm the boring den mother controlling the unruly creative children or else I'm the corporate greedhead with some as yet unseen angle to exploit the honest but naive performers.
In other words, I have a history of 'enabling' other performers' inability to get their shit together such that it affects my ability to look after my own creative career. I end up as the bad guy and that's just no fun.
There is an obvious caveat: I am writing about collaborations that start out as 'symmetrical' then mutate. There are any number of highly successful teams where different people take different roles, which is fine as long as those roles are defined clearly and preferably in advance.
I just delivered my first training day of 2009 at a conference in Are, Sweden.
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Of course I had to return to London immediately after the session. Sometimes the only way I can stay sane with all the business travel is to promise myself that I'll return to that beautiful place at my leisure and on my own dime.
My last job interview was in 1990 so I've had no reason to write a resume in almost twenty years. Yet in that time I've provided hundreds of 'biogs' to both consulting clients and comedy promoters. There is an obvious difference between the two: -
A 'biog' is an invitation to tell a selective story about yourself whereas a resume must be comprehensive
Each of us has a variety of stories about ourselves and we're continually forced to choose which one to tell. Anyone who's ever joined an online dating site has agonised over which personal details to include in the written profile and what to exclude until first impressions have been made.
The same dilemma presents itself when I first meet a new client: what information do I offer up and in what order? My tendency has always been to keep the two broad themes of my life (comedy, consulting) quite separate; just as I don't want my pharma clients to see me as frivolous, I want to avoid coming across as too 'corporate' on stage.
I have decided that this is a mistake.
It underestimates my clients and my audience. A huge part of my ongoing attraction to pharmaceutical clients is the uniqueness of my background. Implied in my brand premise is that if you're looking for an MBA then call McKinsey. Similarly, the first rule of stand-up is 'talk about what you know'. If I leave corporate life out of my comedy then I'm left with the same list of topics (airline security, the Daily Mail, American tourists in London) as every other comic and my ability to differentiate myself is massively diminished.
Write out an unflinchingly comprehensive resume. Now look for convergence. As a small-shop consultant that's where you're most likely to find your USP.
I've always examined the past in years but measured the future in months. It gives me a greater sense of urgency: '2 years' is a milestone but '24 months' is time not to be squandered.
Yesterday I got back from three fantastic weeks visiting friends and family in Sydney. Sitting at my desk in London (outside temperature: -1C!) I get a resounding sense that the clock is ticking.
London affords me career opportunities that no other place on earth can offer, certainly not Australia. I have European and American pharmaceutical clients where I have entree to the Head Office rather than a National or Regional branch. I am a regular on the world's best, most vibrant, stand-up comedy circuit with nigh on automatic access to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. And producing theatre here counts in a way that a Sydney show never will.
We've lived in the UK for 3 1/2 years now and in June I'll be 42. The time back in Sydney has reminded me that we won't be here forever. We've probably got 18 months left here, 36 at the outside so 2009 has to count.
Don't they all?
As I've mentioned previously, I am going to produce a theatre show in Camden, North London next year. Theatre is almost always a collaborative process. Improvised theatre, which is the nature of this show, always is.
'Playing nicely with others' will be one of my big challenges for 2009.
An old friend of mine has recently decided to 'go it alone' and start his own consulting business. He's already had a hugely successful career over twenty years culminating in running one of Australia's largest marketing research firms. Now, after a six-month sabbatical, he's going to start all over again.
Once upon a time my heart would've leapt at the news. Another smart, experienced and articulate mate to bounce around ideas, to celebrate the wins and laugh off the losses. Now I'm not so sure. What if he surpasses in two years what I've built over twenty? I'm wary of a mindset that an acting buddy once described to me as:-
Everyone's having my career but me
I think that a big part of healthily working for yourself means avoiding Gore Vidal's curse ("Every time a friend succeeds I die a little inside").
I need to be secure enough in my own achievements to be able to genuinely celebrate his. What manner of friend am I otherwise?
Today my wife and I leave for three weeks in Australia. We're girding our loins for a flight that's near enough to 24 hours but at the other end is family and friends, sunshine and laughter.
2008 was a great year for my business, both consulting and comedy and I have huge plans for 2009 so the break is both warranted and needed.
But what sort of break?
My clients have been warned to expect as much as a 12-hour response time to emails and to avoid unscheduled phone calls wherever possible. This is as much as I can offer myself without stressing that my business will suffer.
Headcount = 1 means I actually relax more when I can check emails than when I leave the BlackBerry at home.
Woody Allen, the patron saint of all cerebral comics, once said: -
"80% of success is just showing up"
Earlier this week I was scheduled to meet with another comic about a 2009 project. Fifteen minutes before we were due to meet he sent me a text message citing problems with an ex-girlfriend to cancel the meeting. This is a talented and funny guy who has committed to a career in stand-up comedy. In other words,
this is what he does for a living.
Maybe he was telling the truth or perhaps he had more 'professional' reasons for ditching our meeting but didn't want to hurt my feelings. Either way he didn't seem to approach the appointment as part of the job.
If your impulse towards self-employment is driven by a desire to blur the lines between work and hobby then you're probably better off treating everything with the seriousness of work.
I've heard nothing further following a meeting ten days ago when I was asked to guarantee the validity of my current thinking for a period of 10+ years. At the time I made no promises and I'm still happy that I took that option.
Right now I'm finding that people who should have a 12-18 month focus (ie sales managers) are making sage predictions about their needs in 2018. Perhaps it's because the spectre of the billions wasted in obsolete IT investments has gotten into the water supply and in these straitened times waste is unforgivable.
Most of my pharma clients have an annual staff turnover within the team of about 15%. Anything under that makes you a genius sales manager. So even if you're very, very good at staff retention you'll still have no more than 1 in 5 of your team members in ten years. Any investment in training needs to account for this as well as the fact that the individuals within the team will change and grow as well. And one of the quickest ways to raise that turnover is to insist that intelligent, productive people undertake useless training that vaguely promises to address a need that may or may not arise over the next decade.
I'm not suggesting that an organisation doesn't need a ten-year horizon but it also needs a one-year one.
I am a late convert to Mac products. For years I eschewed the opportunity to self-brand as 'creative' because of the many, seemingly deliberate, trade-offs that Apple puts in opposition to businesslike seriousness.
About eighteen months ago I relented and bought a MacBook Pro. I've been living with the trade-off ever since. I use the MS Entourage suite because the Apple Mail programme won't deliver the formal style of emails that my clients expect. Similarly, I have yet to properly resolve the conflict between the industry standard Adobe Acrobat and a continual default to Apple's Preview. Nevertheless I am happy and I admit that my heart does lift a little every time I use something like the Dashboard function. Like I said, I'm a convert.
On Friday I went into Apple's flagship store on Regent Street and bought Time Capsule. I haven't been 100% comfortable with my backing up and it simply isn't professional for me to have any doubt in my mind about data retrieval and the product came highly recommended. Back at home I realised that I needed to upgrade my Operating System from 'Tiger' to 'Leopard' so I went back into town this morning and bought the upgrade.
Over two visits to the store I spoke to five different staff members. All were young, polite and extremely enthusiastic about Apple products. They each took the opportunity to tell me how cool the product was that I was buying. But not one of them asked me what I used my computer for.
The store represents a genuine triumph of branding over salesmanship and I feel that my business is a little more exposed each time I shop there.
I have just committed to devising, directing and producing a theatre show in London next year. The prospect is more than a little scary because it's years since I've produced anything theatrical and never in London, which is probably the most competitive live entertainment market in the world.
There are no half-measures with producing. You either commit to it fully, by which I mean emotionally, financially and in every other way, or you don't bother. I have a theatre booked for three weeks March-April and I also plan to be in Edinburgh for all of August.
One effect of this is that the amount of time that I can devote to consultancy in 2009 is already seven weeks less than my clients might imagine. But if I don't afford the theatre project equal priority in the diary then I will fail.
