When was the last time you laughed at work?
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You’ve heard about my client vetting process before. One reason I’m so rigorous on my client vetting is that I want to have fun with my clients. If you aren’t having some fun, you might wonder what you are doing in your business life. Laughter and good humor are the canaries in the mine of
Meh to Sexy Problems
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I just found a great podcast called The Distance, which is all about businesses that have been running for 25 years or more. Businesses you won’t hear about raising venture capital and ones that likely aren’t revolutionizing everything you’ve come to know and love. These are businesses you’re not going to read about on any
Where You Focus is What Grows
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Hey, did you know the grass is always greener on the other side? If you’re employed, it’s better to be freelance. If you’re freelance, being employed means you don’t have to chase clients for payment or worry about where the next pay cheque (funny Canadians and their spelling eh?) will come from. Okay we know
How to Keep Your Team Effective
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As your business grows you will, at some point, be faced with the decision to make a change from managing just yourself to managing a team. If that scares you stop the growth curve and be happy with running a solo business. For those that choose to move to a team structure, you no longer
How you run your business shows your character
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Running a business tests your character in very hard ways. It deals with livelihoods and money which seems to bring out the worst in people. You’re going to get asked about competitors and a sure fire way to show your customer how poor your character is is to talk poorly about your competition. There are
It Doesn’t Matter What You Like
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Recently, I was bidding on a project, in competition with a few other developers I know, and one of them won. According to the client the reason they didn’t go with me was my payment terms. For a 10-day project I wanted to get paid 50% up front and the rest after 10 business days.
How I keep up with web technology
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The web moves fast. You learn one technology and guess what? Something better comes out. No longer is the thing you just learned the thing everyone is raving about. It’s this new thing you don’t know anymore. There is danger in changing things up all the time. That danger is that you never really become
Why my initial client questions are not on my contact form
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I recently had a great question from a reader. After reading my posts on client vetting and looking at my business site this reader wanted to know why I don’t include my initial questions in my contact form — why I ask them in the first email instead. Process First off, while the reader is
Sitting in the middle is nothing to be ashamed of
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We’ve got heroes all around us — people like DHH (founder of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp), Tim Ferris, Brennan Dunn, and Nathan Barry. For big WordPress shops, some of the heroes are 10up, Web Dev Studios, Human Made or Crowd Favorite. They are the stories of wild success out of seemingly nowhere (though most
Don’t just focus on your rights
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Way to many of us service professionals get all wrapped up in what we deserve. How we should be treated. What we should be paid. What type of treatment does the client deserve though? Are you so wrapped up in what you deserve you don’t even bother to think about what your clients deserve.
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