Financial and Mortgage Paradise

Efficiency is a sophisticated form of laziness. Give this claim some careful thought. The more sorted you are, the less you need to panic. The better organized you are, the less time you will waste faffing about at the last minute in a state of disarray, and the more time you will have to enjoy yourself on your own terms. There is also a strong chance that the quality of what you produce will be higher, better considered and more fulfilling. As soon as you have secured a meeting, take the time to work out exactly what you need in order to make it a success. This might include:

- Your CV

- Client list

- Case histories

- Examples of what you produce

- A list of ways in which you may be able to help

- A proposal or the outline of one

- Research or observations on their market and the issues they face

- Price list

- Terms of business.

If the need for these materials is fairly obvious, then immediately print them off and assemble them in a sensible way, with enough copies for everyone. How many times have you been to a meeting where people that have never been mentioned before turn up? You need to anticipate this and have spares of everything that matters so that you come across as professional and can address your ideas to the attendees who are going to have a direct bearing on the purchasing decision.

Now put your materials in a folder marked with the name of the people you are meeting and, if you need to, the date (but bear in mind that it will almost certainly change). If it needs more thought than that, either do the thinking now or write the preparation time in your personal organizer straightaway, always leaving plenty of time to do it before the day. This is particularly important because, if it does need more thought, it is highly likely that you will uncover more complicated issues when you do get round to reviewing it. If this is the case, then preparing moments before the meeting will be cutting it too fine. Apply this to your meeting preparation and to what you do after you have had the meeting and have agreed that there are things to be done. There is often quite a gap between a meeting being arranged and it actually taking place. This can cause problems because, if you don’t get organized now, you may well forget the subtleties of what the meeting is truly about, or indeed, what you have chosen to make it about. This may sound odd, but many people just write ‘meeting with x’ in the diary and think no more about it until the day before. This is hopeless. The clever angles are usually all lurking in the original phone call, and the only way to capture these is to do it now.

The same is true after a meeting. All the details and nuances are fresh in your mind and, although some issues may certainly require longer consideration, the chances are that your first instincts about roughly what needs to be done in response to a particular issue are about right. Make those decisions now and prepare your response. Under no circumstances convince yourself that it’s okay to ignore it all because the follow-up meeting or your official response isn’t due for a couple of weeks. By then you will have forgotten some of the finer points, and your response will be poorer as a result. With this organized approach, you can never be caught out by a meeting, even in the very unlikely event that you have forgotten all about it until the last minute.

Another important activity related to this level of organizational discipline is to examine your personal organizer often, not only to survey that day’s appointments, but to look ahead and anticipate your flow of work. Thinking ahead is your best ally in the tricky business of dealing with many things at once. The better you are at doing things now, the more freedom you will have to accept other speculative work as and when it crops up.

It also reduces your worry levels because you know for sure that you really are prepared for something, no matter how far in the future it is, and now you can relax and get on with something else, be it work or pleasure.

The phone is a two-way machine that can be a great asset or an object that invokes considerable fear. Many people hate what they describe as ‘cold-calling’. If you are one of them, and particularly if you are in a service business, you need to address this issue urgently and befriend your phone. Once you get the hang of it, it’s really not as bad as you think.

Who said cold-calling was cold? Rarely has an activity been so badly titled. Calling someone on the phone is usually a very pleasant thing to do. Even in business. In reality, those who view it as cold-calling are probably cold themselves, and are not that keen on other people anyway. It is far better to view the whole process as just calling someone for a chat. The fact that you have never met that person has nothing to do with it. If you are charming and have something interesting to say, it will be a pleasure for both sides. You wouldn’t hesitate to call a friend, and sometimes you might even call them without a reason. In business, there is always a reason, so all you have to do is state clearly what the reason is and get to the point.

There are many ideas here about how to get the conversation started and overcome the initial hurdles. However, they will work to a lesser degree until you get to grips with the emotional barriers and convince yourself that it really isn’t such a big deal to pick up the phone, and that great things can happen once you take the plunge. One way to do this is to consider all the worst things that could possibly happen if things don’t go as well as you hoped. Here are some examples:

They say they are not interested in what you do

So what? This is very valuable information. Lots of people spend weeks, months, years even, pursuing someone who simply isn’t interested in what they have to offer, and never will be. This could be an individual or a company whose culture doesn’t suit yours and vice versa. Take it on the chin and move on.

They refuse to take your call

This is most interesting. If someone spends the bulk of their time hiding behind a barrage of secretaries and assistants, there are two things you can deduce about them. Either they may be genuinely busy, or they enjoy creating the impression that they are busy. If it is the former, then it doesn’t mean that they are not interested in what you do. Either keep trying or use a different method of getting in touch that suits their style better. If it is the latter, you need to think carefully about whether you would really like to do business with them. Will they be a badly-behaved customer? Will they respond to your calls if you do end up working together? Will they pay you on time? And there are a host of other issues that could make your life a misery. ‘Only do business with people you like’ is a maxim that will serve you well.

They are rude or dismissive

This is a bit unpleasant but no less helpful than either of the above. Rude people may well occupy influential positions for intermittent periods, but nobody enjoys working with them and, over time, the system spits them out. If you work on your own, there is absolutely no point in dealing with people of this type. They ruin your life and they do not deserve your contribution. Avoid them like the plague.

Staying sane and relentlessly enthusiastic. Mmm. Is this a realistic goal or some sort of nirvana that nobody who works on their own could realistically be expected to achieve? We’ll have a look at the sanity part first. The definition of sanity is ‘the state of having a normal healthy mind’ or ‘good sense and soundness of judgement’.

We are talking here about the condition of a rational person who feels well balanced and reasonably calm. Many aspects of modern life would appear to be designed to unhinge us at every opportunity, and the pressures of any breadwinner in today’s society are well documented. This is precisely why so many people choose to earn their living from a company rather than to generate the income themselves. They welcome the comfort and the safety net that company structures appear to offer. The buildings are provided and so is the pattern of work. Sometimes they receive all sorts of other luxuries – cars, travel allowances, health care, life insurance, and so on. And although it often appears that these parts of the package are there purely for their monetary value, in truth many people value them for their supporting properties as much as their financial value. In some circles, this debate has moved on so far that you can now find books that ask what companies are for anyway. Some conclude that, whereas many would assume that they are there to make money for the owners, they actually perform a focal role in society and are there to bind people together in a structured way. We have all met people who claim that they couldn’t get anything done if it weren’t for their partner who organizes everything, whether that’s arranging the social life remembering birthdays or booking a holiday. In a work context’ there would appear to be many who could not even do their work without the support services provided by their colleagues – the majority of these colleagues seemingly more junior than them. You know the sort of thing: ‘If her secretary wasn’t there she wouldn’t turn up anywhere.’

You need to engineer a set-up that keeps you sane. How then, do you also remain relentlessly enthusiastic? First of all enthusiasm is an absolutely fundamental prerequisite o someone who runs their own business. Nobody else is going r generate business for you. No one else is going to be enthusiasti on your behalf. The job falls to you. People don’t want to d business with someone who lacks enthusiasm, so one way or another you need to find a way of having an endless supply of the stuff. However, roughly:

- Keep lots of variety in what you do to stay fresh

- Get keyed up for phone calls and meetings, and try to be in a good mood before you do them

- Change things if you don’t find them interesting

- Take a sensible amount of time off so that you can return to your work energetically.

The net effect for your customers should be that your enthusiasm appears to be relentless even though of course it is impossible for any person to be in that state as a permanent condition. You will have noticed that a vital part of this is taking the right amount of time off work. How many times have you heard a self-employed person say that they haven’t had a holiday for ages? Even if they have arranged it and left the country, they still keep worrying about the business when they are lying on a beach somewhere. This is a poor formula that usually leads to some form of meltdown, with both the business and the individual inevitably suffering.

One particularly helpful trick is to build time off into your plan for the year. Don’t do it on the fly halfway through. If you do it ad hoc like this, there is a very strong chance that the break that you do go for won’t really do the trick. You will almost certainly have compromised on one aspect or another, and this does not befit the reward that you have earned entirely off your own bat. So look at the year and ask yourself these sorts of questions:

- When are the best times of year to be away?

- Will you take one large chunk or several smaller bits?

- Do you need a sabbatical?

- If so, how would you arrange it?

- What if you plan a 10-month year instead of 12?

- Can you arrange the financial aspects now?

- Where do you want to go?

- In what sort of style?

- With anyone else or on your own?

- What sort of research do you need to do before you can answer some of these questions?

This way, you can plan excellent time off, pre-market the timing of it to your customers, and you do not need to worry about the possible implications when you are away because you have planned the whole thing properly. In addition, the fact that you have put so much thought into your recreational time says volumes about the level of thought that you apply to your customers’ business issues. Even better, when you are actually taking the time off, you can relax completely safe in the knowledge that this is exactly what you have been working for.

Do remember, however, that confidence can be misplaced. In fact, over-confidence could beguile you into believing that you have a viable idea or a pleasant way of doing things when you don’t. Confront your own hubris and work it out privately before it trips you up. You work for yourself now, so you don’t have to pretend about anything. In truth, you mustn’t ever stray into the realms of fantasy because you would only be fooling yourself if you did. From now on it is your job to be sensible and realistic. Do not exaggerate your potential or delude yourself that you can do all sorts of things that you cannot. Equally, do not be sheepish about your skills. You will need to get used to showing a fascinating blend of confidence and humility. It is perfectly fine to have a different external persona, but make sure that you are honest with yourself and that you know your true self.

Consider your position with extreme care and as much objectivity as you can muster. Ask yourself:

- What are you good at?

- How much is that worth to someone else?

- How much will someone pay for what you have to offer?

- Is that enough for you to live on, or to satisfy your ambitions?

Get a piece of paper. Write down what you want to do in your business. Consider it for a while, and then decide whether anyone else would agree with you. This is the beginning of establishing whether there is indeed a market for what you do. Go for a walk. When you come back, look at your piece of paper again. Is it any good? Is it nonsense? If so, write a new one. Stick it on the wall and live with it for a few days. Does it still make sense? Is it rubbish? Does everyone else claim the same thing? What’s so different about the way that you would run your business?

These early enquiries are really important. They are the starting point of you being able to have a board meeting with yourself. A degree of schizophrenia here is essential. One half of your mind needs to be capable of putting forward an idea, and the other half needs to be smart enough to confirm or reject it without upsetting yourself in the process. That’s no easy matter. So practise debating things on your own, weighing up the pros and cons, reaching a sensible conclusion, deciding what to do next, and remaining calm and objective throughout the whole process.

The contact list

- The contact list is your lifeblood, and should be examined almost every working day.

- Start the first draft of the list by writing down everyone you know with whom you could possibly do business, and with whom you could get in touch.

- Ideally, it should only have the name of the person, the company and the date you last made contact with them on it.

- Don’t be tempted to add other information. It will only distract you from the simple matter of picking up the telephone.

- If you really do feel that you need more information, write it somewhere else. Do not be tempted to enhance the list with extraneous detail – it has no bearing on the likelihood of you making the call, organizing a meeting, or achieving the thing that needs to be done, it only blurs your ability to get on with the task in hand.

- Every time you speak to someone or meet up with them, write the date down and move their details to the top of the list.

- This becomes your ready-made recall system. When you do not have anything to do, look at the very bottom of the list to see who you haven’t been in touch with for some time

- Having this list basically means that you can never legitimately claim that you have nothing to do. If you ever actually find yourself believing that this is the case (very unlikely when you work on your own, but let’s just suspend disbelief for the moment), then you simply go to the bottom of your contact list and call that person for a catch-up.

- If you fix a meeting or do get work as a result of that call, you might give yourself the afternoon off. That’s down to you, because only you know whether you deserve it.

The number of people on your contact list needs constant scrutiny. If there are more than 500 on the list at the outset, you are either fooling yourself or spreading yourself too thinly. It is much better to have a smaller number of viable, genuine prospects than a huge list full of people you don’t really know.

Keep a constant eye on your frequency of contact. If you overdo it, after a period of receiving your (perhaps unwanted) solicitations, you will begin to tarnish your reputation (in other words, you will have overstepped the Pester Line). Or you will simply dissipate too much of your time on people who aren’t interested in what you have to offer.

On the other hand, if there are less than 100 contacts on the list at the outset, your business may not be viable. If you were honest with yoursel, then you should have judged this correctly. You need a decent universe against which to apply the normal laws of probability. If you are utterly charmed, it is possible that you could sustain a living on five customers who give you precisely the amount of work that you want exactly when you need it. That’s very unlikely, although it might just be feasible in a service industry where you have an established reputation that provides a ready-made flow of work.

Much more likely is a selection of potential clients who don’t actually give you work despite regular promises; work which does eventually arrive but much later than you expected; projects which turn out to be much smaller than anticipated when they do eventually arrive; and so on. If you sell a product, you may to a certain degree be at the whim of various market forces, a series of random factors, and the possible effectiveness of whatever offers and promotions you decide to run. Therefore, it is better if you can generate your own pipeline to even out all these variations.

In the start-up phase of a service business, you are allowed to have only 50 contacts, but you will definitely need 100 within three months. It is also worth considering whether your founder customers will continue to be long-standing customers and, if so, for how long. You will soon conclude that some will fall away, leaving the onus on you to develop fresh contacts. Be careful to consider this issue early, otherwise by the time you spot it in the normal run of things, you will already need the new work, and you will be dismayed by the time lag until new work materializes.

One of the most common laments of people working on their own is ‘I’m too busy servicing existing customers to find new ones.’ What feels like only moments later, the existing customer* have moved on, and that person may well be out of business. Under no circumstances let this happen to you. It is your responsibility to become adept at running existing relationships whilst simultaneously engineering new ones. You are a plate spinner, a dextrous juggler, and a one-man band all rolled into one. Scary but true: If you cannot generate 50 genuine contacts in the start-up phase of a service business, you should not be working on your own.

The new business hit list

Your second essential tool is the new business hit list. This is the list that you generate once your contact list has taken shape. You need to think carefully and very broadly about anyone who could have a bearing on the success of your business. This is not a cynical exercise in exploitation. It is merely casting the net as wide as possible to make the most of the potential contacts that you have.