Lately I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people wondering whether they should consult, freelance, start a business, or if it even matters which road you take so it seemed like maybe a post on the subject might help.

I stayed a consultant for 2 years before I formed Real Bullets Branding because when you first go off on your own you’re going to have to think about a lot of things that you didn’t before.  Like, “what does my schedule look like?”, “how am I going to structure my offerings?”, and mainly “how am I going to pay my bills?”.  Actually, you’ll spend most of your time thinking about that last one.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to decide which one fits for you:

1) Might I Get Another Job? This one is really important because perhaps you are planning to work with a few clients while you take a long, hard look at what you’d like your next full time gig to be.  Even if you aren’t going to actively search for a new job, would you take one if a great opportunity came along? If so, then consulting is much easier to transition into a full time job than closing a business.  Plus people will want to know why you closed said business on your resume whereas it’s not as stigmatized if you do it as a consultant.

2) Is Your Network Tied To Your Name? In other words, do the people that you want to work with know you as ‘Caitlin from Madison’ (people probably don’t know you as Caitlin from Madison, but you get the idea)? If so, then realize that your potential clients may not recognize you when you start emailing them as “Red Chair Industries”.  When you’re spending a ton of time trying to pay your bills, don’t have a sales team, and already have a ready to go network that knows you personally, it might make sense to consult for a while.

3) Do You Have Time To Spend On Branding? This was a big eye opener to me.  I figured that opening a business would be the same as consulting I would just have a better company name.  The truth is, your business is going to require branding of its own.  You’ll have to introduce people to your business, market it as a separate entity, and things that you might have only been doing for yourself previously.  This takes a lot of time and if you don’t have a lot of marketing experience, could end up becoming a major expense.

On the other hand:

4) Do You Know Your Tax Laws? If you are consulting or opening a business you need to befriend a CPA right away.  I feel really bad for mine because I ask him totally ridiculous amateur questions on a near constant basis but a good CPA can pretty much save your life as a business owner.  They can also tell you whether your state is friendly to entrepreneurs or not.  Here’s a link to a map where you can see what kinds of rules your state has.  The small business and entrepreneurial council also recently ranked states with the lowest burdens on growth for small businesses – South Dakota and Nevada topped the list and New Jersey and the District of Columbia ended up in dead last.

5) Do You Let Your Business Come Home With You? For me, separating my business from my persona really helped me take a much needed step away from my business.  It was more of a mental thing for me but once I created a separate entity for my business to flow through it really helped me take my days off without checking emails every 10 minutes.  If you are the type of person that is always ‘on’ you might find it helpful to just bite the bullet and open the business.

Instead of just the regular “here’s who we are” and “here’s what we do”, which I think you’ll agree can be boring, spend some time introducing yourself online.
I stumbled on this video for the Dare Agency in London and thought it was pretty cool.

This is Dare. Are you? from thisisdare on Vimeo.

I am sort of a phone addict.  Not in the ‘can’t have a conversation with you because I’m too busy eyeing up my phone’ kind of way (I cannot believe how many professional people do this incredibly rude thing) but definitely in the ‘check it when I’m bored’ kind of way.  Obviously, I’m not the only one that’s doing this sort of thing but here’s a scary graph to back it up:

The rest of the article goes on to outline all sorts of horrors about how tons of people are checking their online presence in the car, while they are in bed, while they are at work, at home when they are with family, basically everywhere.  We could go on all day about if this is healthy (maybe not), if this makes us less productive (probably), and if some rehab facility is going to make a killing off of people who can’t stop Facebooking (I bet it’s in the works now).  What I do want to discuss is that money spent on mobile phones was up 24% since last year which is a lot and people even say that they are EMOTIONALLY attached to their iPhone as a brand. As opposed to say, warm and fuzzy brands like Hershey’s or Fruit of the Loom. Here are the top 20 —->

So what does the fact that people are spending tons of money on phones, accessing their phones ad nauseum all day, and emotionally loving their phones mean for the average marketer?

That there’s opportunity here.  The good news is, that while most brands have caught on to the whole ‘Facebook, twitter’ thing most have no mobile presence at all.  So while you might be tempted to continue to spend tons and tons of time catching up with you competitor’s awesome Facebook Page, you could go another route entirely and come up with a great mobile strategy and come out on top.

The truth is, people aren’t accessing your page from just their laptop anymore.  They are coming from their iPad, Blackberry, iPhone, and whatever other devices they are checking while driving.  It’s really important to plan for this on your site.

1) Is your site even visible on a smartphone?  This is an easy one so you should start here.  Get someone with a smartphone to try and access your site.  Make sure that it comes up and looks good. If it doesn’t, talk to a web professional right away.  Check other devices and see how your site looks on those as well.

2) Apps aren’t just games anymore.  A lot of b2b brands and more professional services think that an app. isn’t for them because they have only seen game apps.  Not so.  For example, I really wish I had thought of this app.  TeuxDeux.  It’s a site that’s basically just a simple To-Do list online. Then they added an iPhone app version of it.  I love it because I can add items to my to-do list on the go and when I get on my computer, there are all my new items along with my original items.  I don’t have a lot of time for games but I can certainly respect a brand that makes my life easier.

Is there a portion of your site that you can turn into an app to make life easier for your customers?

3) People are getting more comfortable with purchasing on their devices other than a laptop.  I personally think it has to do with iTunes and Amazon making it ‘push of a button’ easy to purchase things but people are okay with setting appointments, checking balances, and buying services and goods without ever talking to anyone on your staff.  People are going to think of doing this while waiting in line, in the car, picking up the kids, etc. so the need for easy purchasing is going to get bigger and bigger.  Explore options now so you can provide this for your own customers.

desk – $350 from a flea market.  Don’t you love the industrial / farm chic-ness of this?  The bottom is made of metal pipes.

deer antlers – $50 for 3 sets. Flea market.  I love, love, love these and was going to spray paint them white but decided that we liked them au natural.

So this is the first post from my new office.  Well, what should have been my new office until the New Jerseyite’s job went virtual and now it’s OUR new office.  I didn’t handle the news terribly maturely.  In fact, I was terrified of us working in our new office and how that would affect our relationship.  Would our working time suddenly count as ‘quality time’ together and would we take off and do separate things the minute we were done working?  Did he know that I can be a stress ball all day long some days and that’s why I work so well remotely from other human life? Did he know that during my breaks I sometimes watch ‘Keeping Up With The Kardashians”?

Then I found tons of articles about couples that work together.  Here’s one that  summarizes six major areas of potential trouble for couples who work together: (1) strife caused by restricted job mobility; (2) excessive demands on each spouse’s time and energy; (3) inability to separate professional and personal problems; (4) role conflicts; (5) spouse competitiveness; and (6) bringing home work-related problems.  You can tell this article was written when tech wasn’t such a big business since ‘bringing home work related problems’ has already been something we struggle with considering both of our lives are pretty much all online.   This isn’t a couples problem, it’s an everyone problem.

On the other end of the spectrum here’s a more modern one that says that especially in the tech world “coworking” with your significant other can be a good thing if you can learn to retain your own personal life and friends. This made me feel slightly better since it didn’t end with a vision of us killing each other in my mind.

I brought all of this up in a 2 hour marathon talk about the subject and the New Jerseyite said “you wake up at 6:30 to work and take a gym break at 9:30 when I start working.  Your schedule is so different than mine so we won’t really be working together all that often”.

A few days later I found this article about a couple who works together (and has) for 20 years and has some great advice on the topic.  For example, ‘don’t separate your work and life’, which obviously flies in the face of most advice but makes a lot of sense.  Her wholistic view of career fits nicely with people in the tech world.  I start to feel even better about our new office.

File cabinet – $60 – This used to be in a bank!  Flea Market.  I also got these old advertisements from another flea market for something like $1 each.  I’m going for kind of an old school Mad Men on a Farm sort of look.

So we’re going to have to figure this out, learn to work together, and if we have a tough day there’s always my favorite addition to our new office:

“Maybe this is a stupid idea”

I’ve been meeting a lot of new business owners lately.  Through groups, some that I’ve helped to start, some online, they seem to be everywhere.  When I sit down with them they are stressed out, worried, excited.  Some have business cards already, some have a client, some have just an idea.  I am not always sure what they want to talk about but invariably they will say “maybe this is a really stupid idea”.

I usually respond that the “stupid idea” feeling doesn’t go away.  Ever.  I have been opening my own businesses for years and some days I still think it’s a stupid idea.  In other words, get used to that feeling but know that it comes up less frequently over time.  Also, the “stupid idea” feeling can’t do anything to tangibly hurt your actual business.

Profitability is another thing.

There are so many reports on how most businesses fail within the first year that before you even begin you’re probably aware of the high probability that you’ll fail.  Neat.  Here’s one that gives the top 10 reasons that cause a business to fail, and the interesting thing about this list is that 6 of these reasons have to do with profitability and funds.

In my own observations this is a bit of a disconnect.  When a lot of new business owners start out they are thinking “I need a new logo, a new site, new marketing,” when they should be thinking “how can I make rent?”  That’s it.  Just “how am I going to pay my bills by doing what I know how to do?”

Jason Fried of 37 Signals talks about revenue streams that are a byproduct of his business.  For example, some of his software products came into existence because his team needed a better way to organize themselves.  Once something worked for them they sold it to other people.  When profitability is a top priority you might be surprised what you can think of to help make rent.  Early on I actually tried my hand at being a stylist for a while when business was slow because a few people asked me about doing it.  I stopped because there are an ungodly amount of fashion blogs out there to keep current and if you are one of those superhumans that can keep up with them all then you deserve a medal.  It honestly almost gave me a heart attack seeing my fashion blog reader at 5000 articles EVERY DAY.   Potentially a stupid idea but I made rent.

Anyway, there is no rule that you can’t support your business by inventing new revenue streams.  When I mentioned to a friend with a chocolate store that perhaps she could write some ebooks on pairing chocolate with food and sell them online or be paid to speak at foodie gatherings she said she hadn’t thought of it because she only saw herself as 2 things.  A shop owner and a chocolate maker.  Yet being creative about pairing your skills with the needs of the community you happen to be in can be the difference between profitable and ordering another round of design changes to your website.

This works for big business too, not just consultant types.  Bigger businesses might have a harder time seeing their profitable skills because they are so used to doing things in a certain way but with online and social media there is usually some treasure trove of information or skill that comes out of our discovery meetings that leave them saying “people would be interested in this?”

To which I say “people are interested in articles about dressing up their ferrets - yes, people are interested”.

I walked in the door a few weeks ago after a day full of meetings and phone calls and flopped on the couch.  I was frustrated because I was actively looking to hire someone to help me with “work stuff” and was having a hard time defining what “work stuff” was and also a person who could do said “stuff”.  All I knew was that I could get all my work done but hadn’t been able to find time to get a haircut since March.

As I looked around from my spot on the couch I realized that there was also a rather long and embarrassing list of things that needed to be done at home.  Like the dishes, vacuuming, black bananas on the counter that needed to be tossed and laundry was literally piled waist high in Ryan’s closet.  When Ryan got home we got in a fight about how I didn’t think he was helping enough because he can easily ignore things like laundry piles and I literally have trouble sleeping if I know it’s there.  My final threat was “if you don’t help more with this then I’m getting a cleaning lady.”

The thought sounded ridiculous.   I’m living in a small apartment with my boyfriend.  We have no kids and no pets.  We should by all means be able to handle the day to day around here.  However, we both own businesses and work hours that are insane and when I get an hour to myself these days I just want to turn the air conditioner up really high and lay around on the floor reading design magazines.  Or try to make something that involves ink or cutting things up or cooking which only adds to the problem.

Over the next few weeks I met someone who owned her own real estate business and now had 5 employees.  I told her that I was looking to hire someone but was having trouble writing a job description.  She told me “write down what you dislike doing the most about your work every day and that would be my job description”.  Great advice.

So I made a list of things that I wouldn’t mind getting someone else to do.  I worked it and reworked it and changed my mind and then wrote: throw away black bananas.  Could my new hire throw away black bananas?  They wouldn’t, but a cleaning service would.

So I started Googling cleaning services in the area.  Lots of things popped up that promised everything from deep cleans to laundry services to grocery shopping.  I felt like I was in heaven.  Would I pay $99 to have these angels of house cleaning to come and make 6 hours of housework go away?  Absolutely.  In a heartbeat.  It seemed like something that I wouldn’t want to tell people though.  Was it snobby?  Did it mean I suck at taking care of my apartment?  Why did I have these thoughts about hiring a cleaning service but not about hiring an employee?

This was about defining where I needed help.  It had not occurred to me to assess my life as a whole and pinpoint where I needed the most help.  Now it seems obvious that I would trade dishes and mirror Windexing for an hour of free time or an extra hour to work on strategies, it was just tough to come up with because I don’t really know anyone else my age (besides Photis but I just figured it was because he’s a single guy) that had someone else clean their house for them but once you figure out where you need help it’s much easier to get it.

Ideas:

If you are thinking you need some cleaning help, consider getting a service to come in once a month for a slightly deeper clean.  This way, you can do a more minimal upkeep job between their visits.  It will certainly cost you less than a paid intern.

Consider online grocery stores and cleaning supply stores to save you a trip to the store.

Don’t think about it in terms of extra money spent.  You are adding extra work time or free time to your day by doing this – I see it similarly to hiring a service to take care of invoicing.

photo credit – from moon to moon

When I saw author of “Eat,Pray,Love” Elizabeth Gilbert speak this spring she said “every afternoon I take a silence bath” in which she basically just sits in a room quietly and hangs out with her cat or falls asleep.  “Rough life” I thought “must be nice to be an author with a gazillion readers so that you can take silence baths every day”.  Sometimes I don’t even get to take a real bath every day and  the only silence I get is after I offer up a great idea at a meeting which is frankly less than tranquil.  So yay for Elizabeth and her silence baths.

But the idea stayed in my mind for months.  I wondered if this silence bath was more than lazy meditation or relaxation.  I began to think maybe it was more of an incubation period and perhaps similar to a process I call “marinating”, the secret ingredient to the strategy process.   Also why my bigger projects take me over a month to craft.   Here’s where it fits into the strategy timeline:

1) Read tons of articles.  See films, listen to music, watch plays.  Look at blogs, people’s Flickr feeds, design. Read more articles, go to speeches, watch TED videos ad nauseum.

2) Start thinking of strategy ideas.

3) Marinate.

4) Think some more. Work on other projects.

5) Develop full strategy.

6) Deliver strategy and listen to applause and general adoration.

Though my marinating is far less silent than Elizabeth’s it is still an incubation period of sorts for an idea.  Sometimes an idea marinates for 5 days and there are some I’ve been marinating on (like opening a coworking space) for years.   During the idea incubation process I do all sorts of other things like work on other projects, write content, or develop new processes for my business but it’s still in the back of my mind.  “If I were this or that brand’s audience…..  what would I want to see them writing about?”  This idea of incubation isn’t new but it is frequently skipped because, well, people are busy and being busy to the point of insanity is important at a lot of workplaces.

Sometimes I walk into an office where everyone is uber busy and think “how do people come up with good ideas here?”.  You can tell people are just totally stressed and running from meeting to meeting (sometimes actually running).  In some cases, this busy-ness seems more of an “if you have time to lean you have time to clean” type of thinking where people feel like they have to be insanely busy or they are a complete failure.  I know lots of business owners that feel this way.  They would feel incredibly uncomfortable just “marinating” on an idea and maybe they already have good ideas.

So why is it so important to incubate?

Because coming up with good ideas isn’t really that hard.  Developing them to the point where they are right for the situation, the timing is correct, the resources are there to complete the idea, and a million other factors takes time.  There are so many examples these days of a decent idea in social media strategy and I can tell the team was probably pressed with a 5 day deadline.  No one was given time to draw from their reading, their experience, something they saw that made them connect dots, etc. and it was put out into the world and was unremarkable.   Ideas that are rushed out the door tend to be the most obvious idea and can be full of rookie mistakes.

If you want to try the silence bath, incubation, marinate start by giving yourself two deadlines.  Make your first deadline where you would need it to be if you hurried the process and then make the second one 5 days later.  Don’t use this extra time as a way to procrastinate the project.  Use the extra days to add in some thinking time and maybe you will add some features, an extension of the idea or a partner that will pop into your mind as a perfect fit.  During these 5 days you can and should work on other things but build in an hour or two for your idea and go to a thinking lunch during that time or spend it explaining your idea to someone who isn’t part of the project to see what kinds of words you are using to describe it and what kind of questions it garners, you will inevitably come out with a better strategy.

We’ve all been there.  You’re at some kind of meeting, event, phone conference and someone says “oh!  We’ve decided to try this new site… xyz.com, what are your thoughts on that?”

And you have no thoughts on that site because you’ve never seen or heard of that site.  You try to remember if you read Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, and Wired this month.  Then you start remembering all of the email  industry news updates that you archived instead of reading.  You suddenly become hyper aware of all of the new sites that you probably don’t know of.  All of the cool things your competitors are discovering that you haven’t because you were working on a  project that had deadlines and a million moving parts all last week.  God, you probably missed eleventy million emails of cool stuff.  In the 5 seconds of silence after that question you realize that your business is hopelessly behind and you’ll never ever catch up. Ever.

Ok, maybe yours is less melodramatic but you know what I mean.  In an industry that changes more quickly than any other, I’ve gotten pretty good at keeping up.  Here are a few tips:

Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT try to know every little thing. Let’s just get that out of the way.  There are going to be certain reports, sites, tools, etc.  that you simply won’t know.  What you can do, is find 2-3 people who have different areas of expertise that you trust to keep you in the loop.  I like:

Convince and Convert, Techipedia, Design You Trust, and Brand Flakes For Breakfast.  I know that between these 4 (and myself), I can get a good grasp on what’s going on if I’m really busy.

Change it up. I used to follow some ridiculous number of blogs and RSS feeds and before I knew it, my Google reader was stressing me out because I had 5,000 articles that I needed to read.  What I started doing was every time I found a new cool person or site that I wanted to follow I had to take one out.  This was good on two counts.  For one, I was constantly assessing the amount of takeaway I was getting from each person.  Two, it keeps my reader fresh with new authors and thought leaders.

The things you really need to know are big. What isn’t important to know is every little thing that gets popular.  What is important is that you know where things are going and that moves a lot slower.  Like  that earned media (not put out there by the brand themselves) is really much more impactful than a banner ad or that people might be 60% more likely to buy from a brand if they heard good things about it from their favorite blogger.  Over time, these are either reinforced or proved wrong (during which time you might, I don’t know, work) so it’s good to know what the big thinkers are saying instead of the sites that pump out every single new item.

Don’t be a follower. Keeping up is only hard if you’re following the curve.  Start forming your own opinions on what sites and ideas are great  and you’ll spend less time trying to keep up.  You know what works for you.

Keep an ace up your sleeve. There’s always going to be a need for showing off because there’s always going to be “that guy” at the meeting that is intent on judging your worth by what cool sites you know.  Keep a secret stash of a few amazing, blow you away sites, stats, or tech tools that you can bust out if you need them.  Good places to find those are at the FWA or eMarketer.

A few weeks ago I attended a happy hour for young professionals.  It was the usual array of business owners, marketing people, and tech folks and I was having some great conversations until one lady asked me what I do.

“Social Media strategy” I answered to which she said “oh.  I KNOW how to update Twitter.”  This happens a lot, and it’s ok, but it does bring up a really good point about social media expertise and who businesses should be hiring to complete it. To me, there’s a really distinct group of things that clients should be doing themselves and things they should or at least could hire someone to do which means there is also a distinct group of things that agencies and marketers should be refining their expertise in.

Don’t Become An Expert In

Updating Feeds:  Because honestly?  We should empower our clients to do this.  With the exception of large brands that use their agencies to do all of the marketing functions, most mid size companies have an in house marketer that can do this sort of thing.  When you get into a retainer for tweeting or updating a Facebook account for someone you’re inevitably going to get fired.  Why?  Because the company is going to hire someone that’s going to say “WHAT?!?  We’re paying someone outside this company to tweet for us?  That’s ridiculous!”  And it is ridiculous.  Don’t specialize in the use of technologies that it would behoove a brand to learn themselves. I have taught many clients how to tweet, helped create a calendar to update a Facebook page, and still kept the client because there is a need for people who can help with these:

What’s next?  Should we be using this technology?  Is this really helping our brand?  What kinds of case studies are out there for this?  What has worked for you before?

If you can be an expert that provides answers to these questions, it will be much easier for the brand to facilitate it’s own channels.  Once those channels are running more smoothly, they will feel great because they are Tweeting and writing and updating successfully.  You will feel great because you have helped teach a skill to your client and can work on the next strategy for them.

Along the same lines,

Creating Business Cards: Most small businesses can design their own and they need them so regularly that it won’t make sense for them to hire a designer every time they need new ones.  There is a need for designers and creatives who can:

Create the look and feel of a brand, create mood boards to help brands know where they should be going, decide what feeling the customer should have around the experience with their brand.

When you think about what type of expertise you need or want to give, think about 10 months from now.  Will that area still be integral to your clients?  Will you have to completely rebrand in order to tell people what you do?  From the client side, is this something that makes real sense to get someone else to do or would it be better to just learn it yourself?

Having an event used to involve getting out the stamps and sending invitations but now there are so many online resources that help you manage your guest list (and some even make them look really pretty) that it’s difficult to imagine life without them.  With summer in full swing and events galore I thought it might be helpful to do a quick overview of the tools out there that I have used to coordinate an event (wish I had these when I had an actual events company).  Here’s the cream of the crop and how to use them:

Evite – The first step is to set up a free account. Get a list of all of the info you’ll need to set up your event so that once you start you’re ready. The things you’ll need are time, date, location, and the email addresses of all of your attendees. Once you sign into your account you can “Create An Invitation” and it basically leads you through the process of setting up the invitations including what you want them to look like. Once you have all of the info in you can determine if it’s an open invite (your guests can invite others) and send messages to all guests with updates, etc. When you come back to your account you can tell who has responded yes or no.

Pingg – This is a really great site to use for invites if you want to pay more attention to the aesthetics of your invite. They use artists, illustrators, and many other types of artists to populate their art bank for you to use. Additionally, you can use other forms of delivery such as text message, postal mail, and Facebook to send your invites although they charge for some of those deliveries. Pingg has some of the same guest managing tools as other online invitation sites like Evite.

MyPunchBowl - The standout feature of mypunchbowl is the polling feature. Once you sign up for a free account you can design your invites and add polls to allow your guests to help determine things like “what time should this party start?” and “should this be dress up or casual attire?”. It also has a feature that helps you find a vendor in your area if you need one, such as caterers or tent companies.

EventBrite -  Business group owners pay attention – this one is great if you have more than the occasional event and works especially well for businesses.  There’s a huge number of features including adding payment options should you choose to charge for your event (this adds a small fee to your account).  What I love about this site is that it allows you to add all sorts of helpful functions like managing waitlists and generating name badges.  Hospitality industry – you should try these for your events and just see how much more manageable your overcrowded event becomes.

Facebook – Ah yes, good old Facebook allows you to manage events as well. Just sign into your Facebook page like you normally do and click the “events” section (it’s under your profile picture when you are on the main newsfeed page). Once you’re there you can select to “create an event”. Facebook is a good one to use if you are already Facebook friends with most of the people you are going to invite otherwise it can be kind of a pain. Use Facebook if it’s an event that you are trying to get a lot of people to come to because people can publicly tell all of their friends that they are coming once they RSVP.