sacha chua living an awesome life

It’s hard to say no when you can clearly see how much you can help a client, but I’m making myself learn how to do it. I’d love to be in two or three places working on these amazing and useful things. I haven’t yet figured out how to clone myself, although that’s on the to-do list under “learn how to train people to have and surpass my skills”. If I want to learn the things I set out to learn, I have to pull myself out of the easy wins and head toward the uncertanties.

Consulting is wonderful. Digging deep, making a difference, and learning new skills gave me the same thrills I’d enjoyed in my previous (awesome) job at IBM, with more flexibility and more influence on how I wanted to grow.

I had prepared for spending the first year just finding my bearings and establishing my business, so I’m delighted with the running start. I’m ahead of my savings targets and have been resisting the temptation to inflate my spending. I have an even better foundation for further experiments.

That’s why I have to keep pushing forward to learn more about different areas instead of stopping with the first success. There’s much more to learn. I’m taking September off in order to learn more about tracking and Quantified Self, explore mobile development, and catch up with family and friends in California. I’ve promised myself that in October and November, I’m going to spend the majority of my time creating value outside the time=money equation. I might scale back even further after that. It’s going to be a big shift for me and I expect to feel confused along the way, but other people have figured this out, so I probably can too. :)

It’s easy to respond to other people’s requests, and it’s harder to create the space for your own curiosity. I’m looking forward to doing that, though, and I hope I can learn many useful skills and share many useful things along the way.

A short note now, and more this week. I’ve been thinking about what I want to learn over the next six months of my business experiment, and where I want to get to in the next five years. The first six months have been an amazing start, pretty much as good a start as anyone could ask for. How else do I want to grow?

I’m curious about different ways of doing business. I’ve tried a few already, and if I can put together my notes, that might help other people get started. If I think of this stage as an iterative learning process to help me prepare for the next one, then it makes a lot of sense. I’m trying different things so that I can find a scalable way to create value that’s family-friendly. For example, I’ve tried consulting, contracting, and information products (very briefly – I’d like to dig into that some more). I’m also curious about delegation, automation, application development, subscriptions, plugins, support plans, and performance-based compensation. I don’t need to aim for 100% coverage – I’m not particularly keen on storefront businesses or real estate flipping, for example – but it would be interesting to sample different models and methods, and to connect with people who have gone deeper. So much to explore!

If I happen to come across ways that W- might also enjoy exploring, or save up enough to help with his own experiments, so much the better. That’s why I need to keep exploring instead of settling into the first obvious success. I’m fortunate that I have flexible clients who are willing to experiment right along with me, so I can build success on success and have the goodwill to deal with the occasional flop. :)

It’s like putting together a personal micro-MBA in lifestyle businesses. There are quite a few books and role models in this area now, so that’ll make it easier to learn a lot.

Exciting times!

I’m curious about this because I’ll need it in order to scale, and because it’s one of those universal things. How do people learn how to manage? How can I learn? I’ve read tons of books and blog posts. I’ve heard lots of advice and stories. We have a sense of what good management looks and feels like, and we’re all too familiar with examples of bad management. How do you bridge the gap from theory to practice?

How do you grow into becoming a good manager or a great one? Do we leave it to people who figured out the rules in grade school – “natural leaders”? We don’t get lots of practice or lessons in managing, probably because it’s so easy to step back and let other people make decisions. But the lack of management skills can get in the way of making good things happen, so it’s good to learn how to manage.

What does it look like to consciously develop this skill of orchestrating people’s work and energy? How can you gradually learn it in low-risk situations instead of waiting for workloads to force your hand?

I want to learn more about how to align people and help them grow while creating more value than one could create alone. The world is this candy store of people with awesome skills and possibilities. There’s just so much out there that I’d like to be able to draw on.

On one of my consulting engagements, we have a high school intern who’s doing wonderfully. I’m delighted to have the opportunity to help pick some of his tasks and delegate some things I’ve been working on. I learn from the way he does things, and I enjoy looking for ways for him to make the most of his internship. I haven’t been paying much attention to my outsourcing experiments over the last few months, but I bet that I could learn a lot if I paid close attention to it, going beyond transactions to help people grow. I’ve done that in the past with other assistants, and I really liked the results.

Here’s what wild success might look like: I find good people and help them grow their skills, either working on things I’d like to see happen or good things that people are willing to pay for. Success would be a great fit between the person and the work that needs to be done. They might grow enough to be able to handle these things on their own, in which case I can grow a network of freelancers, or they might prefer the benefits of working with a team. I find clients who have flexible timelines (so that I have time to coach or even do the work if necessary) and are okay with me delegating the work so that people grow, or I find a project I believe in strongly enough to fund and bootstrap until it’s been fleshed out enough to be worth investing in.

Step 1 might be to map people’s interests, skills, and growth plans. Step 2 is trickier. How can I put on training wheels so that I can try things with friendly clients on non-risky projects without taking on too much risk myself? I’m scaling down my consulting work, but I can postpone part of my next experiment if contracting is a better way to learn this. What if I focus on, say, Rails or WordPress stuff, with the understanding that I’ll pair-program with someone, maybe like the apprenticeship systems of the past? I’m fine with Rails, Drupal, and WordPress development, but new to independent contracting, so maybe I should approach it as a learner first – partnering up with someone for a few projects?

What about non-web development ways to learn this? I can delegate more of my processes, and see if other people would be interested in delegating or expanding theirs. That’s something I’m curious about, actually. People need help learning how to give good instructions and build working relationships. It’ll be interesting to see if I can do that in a way that adds value. I think that might actually be more promising than development because I won’t be distracted by the technical side of things. I’ll need to find out if people are looking for help in getting started with delegation. In terms of alternate business models, it might be an agency structure, process libraries, and e-books. Hmm… That would look like phone or Skype conversations about what people want to do, then coordinating with service providers. There are quite a few companies that do this already, but process libraries, automation, and growth might make a difference.

Worth thinking about some more…

I brainstormed a list of things I would like to see fixed. Of this list, there are probably quite a few things that people will pay for. Of that list, there are probably a few things that I can build a sustainable business around. It’ll be interesting to figure out which!

I’m scaling back consulting over the next few months so that I can experiment with other models for business. I could probably stay fully booked offering consulting services, web development, or other things that are time-for-money trades, but if I want to scale up and make a difference bigger than I am, it helps to learn how to build a business that can go beyond me. While I have the space and time to experiment with building a scalable business, I should do so.

Even if all these opportunities around me sound so interesting, I’ll be strict about working only on things where I can either create value disproportionate to efforts (in a good way, I hope!), or I can teach other people to do it and then scale up that way.

Before I started my business, I wasn’t sure if I trusted myself with large swaths of discretionary time. Not free time – all time has a cost – but discretionary time, time that I can direct towards my own purposes. I thought I’d be able to use the time well, but I didn’t know for certain.

I’m starting to be more confident in how I use that time. Sure, I spend some of it hanging out with W- and J-, or exploring the constructed world of LEGO Batman 2… but I also use it to experiment with writing e-books or learning how to build mobile applications.

It’s incredible, picking your own goals and making steady progress towards them. I carved out a decent amount of carefully-protected discretionary time even when I was working for a large company and we made good use of our staycations, but even that doesn’t compare to being able to block off large chunks of time on your own. Vacations and weekends are social, and evenings often are as well. It’s great to have time to still your mind and follow your own questions. A room of one’s own, to learn and write and create.

There’s always the temptation to schedule things over it so that I don’t confront the blank canvas of a day. I meet people occasionally. It’s good for me to talk to people – and, more useful, to listen; not everyone writes. It’s also good to do this in moderation. It’s easy to talk about doing business and being in business and what to learn about business, but I shouldn’t stop there.

So there are days when I sit down and focus on the tasks I set myself. I’m becoming more accustomed to managing this time. I make lists — things I can do, topics I want to learn about, an endless supply of self-directed adventures. There’s always more to learn.

I’ll be consulting on-site four days a week for the next few weeks, but I’ll be playing around with other time arrangements soon. I’m setting aside all of September for discretionary time, and then returning for two days a week of consulting throughout October and November. We’ll see how that goes. I think it’ll go well. Adjusting the training wheels as I learn more about managing my time, energy, and attention!

Writing is a great way to share what I’m learning with lots of people, and I’d like to make that a large part of my life. To test the idea, I wanted to learn how to edit, format, and self-publish an e-book. E-books are handy because I don’t have to worry about inventory, distribution, or shipping. I also have more freedom when it comes to layout and colour, and I don’t have to worry about getting things wrong for an expensive print run. It was a great first step.

Instead of writing a whole new book, I decided to collect my favourite blog posts from my archive. This meant that I could focus on learning the new part – preparing and publishing an e-book – instead of getting bogged down in writing new content. I spent a few weeks re-reading everything and selecting a fraction of the posts. I exported these to HTML files, combined them, and imported them into Microsoft Word so that I could edit and format the posts. I picked Microsoft Word because I wanted to play around with ink annotations in addition to creating a simple layout for the text.

I like using a landscape orientation for easier reading on horizontal screens, so I formatted it with two columns. I added pictures and a few sketches. Instead of one big table of contents, I broke it up into several chapters and added chapter-level tables of contents. This led me to learn about Microsoft Word’s table of contents field and the ability to set up TOCs for a specific section. I wanted the page header to reflect the current chapter title, too, so I learned how to include the chapter as a field.

When I was happy with the document, I exported it to PDF and uploaded it to Lulu. I chose Lulu because I didn’t want to bother with calculating and collecting sales tax for all the different countries. I also didn’t want to spend time building an e-commerce site. I picked $2.99 as the price – low-profit, but also low-risk. Lulu didn’t offer a way to send people updates afterwards, so I asked people to send me their receipts so that I could send them updates if I released a new version. I was delighted to find that a few people bought the book even with very little promotion on my end. (Thank you for your vote of confidence!)

A PDF is great for controlling layout, but it doesn’t display well on many e-reader devices. I exported the Microsoft Word document back to HTML, then used Emacs and Sigil to clean up the HTML markup and convert it to EPUB format. Calibre helped me convert the EPUB to the MOBI format that the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing program requires. I filled in the Amazon KDP forms and created another cover image.

I looked into using Smashwords for distribution, but it used Microsoft Word documents for input, so I went back to Lulu and uploaded the EPUB for distribution to iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble Nook store. We’ll see how that goes.

Putting together an e-book turned out to not be a scary process at all. That means I can start working on other books without worrying about getting stuck at the end of the process. Next book might be 101 Things You Can Do with Emacs! =)

I was talking to a new business owner who had just started with consulting. Her first client was her old company, who hired her back for the same responsibilities – and the same pay. They argued, “Why should I pay you more than I paid you as an employee?” She couldn’t think of good reasons, but at least she negotiated that the monetary equivalent of her benefits and leave would be included in her new compensation.

The standard advice on why you should raise your rates – maybe even double or triple them – when you go from being an employee to being a contractor include these reasons:

• You pay for your own benefits and downtime, so the employer doesn’t have to take on those costs
• You have to do your own marketing, so you should charge clients more to give you some buffer for business development
• You have no job security, so the employer has more flexibility; they don’t have to pay you if they don’t have work for you, while it’s harder to hire and fire employees as the workload changes
• You take on more risks and have less legal protection if, say, the employer doesn’t pay promptly

It feels like these reasons are from the contractor’s point of view, though. I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling a company that the reason why my rates are higher than the salary they might pay an employee is because I have to do my own marketing and business development.

I’d rather focus on the value I may be able to deliver. Is it worth it to the company to pay $X for the results they believe they’ll get with me? If so, great. If they don’t think it’s worth it, they’re welcome to find people with different skills, people with lower rates, or people who are willing to join the organization as an employee. Likewise, is it worth it to me to work on an engagement for $X, instead of focusing on other things I could be doing?

Contractors and companies make decisions based on self-interest, so it’s easier to not stress out about pricing if you remember that the other organization is responsible for getting the best deal they can get and you’re responsible for getting the best deal you can get. Lawyers and accountants make no apologies for the rates they set, and maybe I’ll work my way up to that kind of unblinking confidence someday.

Besides, I want to set aside more time for non-consulting ways to create value. I may raise my consulting rate even higher so that I focus on only the opportunities with high leverage and scale.

Potential clients might ask you why your rates are higher than employees or competitors. Instead of going down the defensive route (oh, you have to take on more risk, etc.), it might be worth breaking it down into the real questions behind it:

• How much are these kinds of results worth to you?
• Do you believe I am capable of delivering these results?
• Am I your best option for delivering those results?

I’m learning!