Business Interruptions

It's slow here right now, as I suspected. One client is sending work by the bucketload, but others are silent. I'm hoping it's simply that it takes a week for them to get back into work mode and start aligning those projects again.

It won't matter. My mother informed me she's coming to stay with me next week. Love seeing Mom. Hate missing work right after I'd taken two weeks off for the holidays. But on my list of priorities, family is first. Therefore, I shall push back those feelings of "won't meet my monthly goals" and entertain her. Then again, I may get a story out of our escapades. And I won't tell her that I promised one client I'd check in nightly for any revisions/updates.

Maybe it's the fear of starvation, but I can't switch off the freelance mindset. Do you have this trouble? My hair's grown about four inches since the last cut. I keep meaning to take time off to get to the salon, but work gets in the way. The dentist, luckily, was scheduled the week I took off for the holidays. But the daughter's eye appointment wasn't, and since I'm paying, I had to be there with her. Then yesterday she needed an SLR camera for her next course. Again, I'm paying, so I had to go with her. Tomorrow, we take her across the state and back to school, stopping overnight at the parents' and picking up Mom (school and Mom within 20 miles of each other). It's a weekend, so I'm okay with it. But imagine if I allowed myself to work weekends. I'd be typing on a laptop in the car (someone else driving, of course).

Because I have 9-to-5 clients, I work weekdays (and usually from 8-to-5ish). For that reason, I'm stingy with my weekends and I will not work over holidays. But oh, the guilt if I miss a weekday, even for a few hours! Next week I'll be in my own professional hell because my mind will keep wandering back to work. I know myself. I can't go fishing in Ontario without spending the first day thinking about what client may be having some sort of writing emergency.

Anyone else suffer this kind of guilt? How do you combat it?

Open Oven, Insert Head

It never fails - I'm riding the high of a great freelancing year and a nice holiday season when WHAMO! there's that damned 1040 tome weighing down my mailbox. Each year I vow to get an accountant. Each year I don't. Each year I do my own taxes. Each year I get a letter from the IRS in May correcting my carefully prepared forms.

Tax season, for me, is like deer season for deer. There's nowhere to hide. No matter what I do, I'm right in the crosshairs and no matter what electronic program I've tried (and I've tried plenty), the IRS is going to hunt me down and tell me where I went wrong.

Last year I used TurboTax, which rechecked my numbers and informed me I was in great shape. For the first time in years, I was elated. Finally, I thought, I've done it right. Imagine my suprise when my now annual IRS "Here's where you screwed up, Lori" letter arrived a few months later, along with a bill (including late fees) for what I hadn't done right. But TurboTax promised! Damn it! Damn it all to hell.

This year I'm starting now. I'm compiling all my forms, papers, 1099s and the like and locating an accountant. Every year I let my better half talk me out of it, but it's pretty clear I'm not exactly cut out for filling in those blanks alone. I need a skilled hand to hold.

Do you have an accountant? How has that saved you money? And do you hate the ides of April (more or less) as much as I do?

If Your Paradigm Shifts, Will it Hurt?

I'm a jargon hater. Seriously. I can't stand the use of five-dollar words when a ten-cent word will do. Yet without fail I see numerous business folks using words like "business critical function" (and where's your hyphen, people?) and "paradigm shift" when they really mean "important" and "change in business focus." It's like an addiction for some. And when I'm charged with interpreting this mumbled mess of buzz words into a new client message, I start to lose it a bit. No, a lot. I lose it a lot.

I once came across a client piece that was 14 pages of today's top buzz words. My task was to boil this down to two pages of relevant, compelling copy. When working on marketing pieces, I usually open a blank email while I work and jot down questions. In this particular piece, the questions nearly outpaced the copy provided. The client, bless her heart, had learned every single bit of jargon she could. If I were to add up all the buzz words using our five-dollar price tag, she'd spent about $2,985 by page 4. Hence my long, confused note back to her for multiple clarifications in people terms. Much to her dismay, I replaced all "facilitate" references with either "use" or "organize" depending on the meaning.

While some clients insist on using certain buzz words (they have reputations to uphold as leaders in their respective industries, or as "top jargon users"), there's no reason why you can't push back a little and insist that too much of a good thing is a bad thing. While it's great to use some jargon to show the client's level of expertise, it's not great to confuse the hell out of the average client. And honestly, there were press releases and various marketing pieces I've seen in my day that simply made me feel too stupid to do business with these people. Not exactly the way to win over new business, is it?

Here's a little list of jargon that is not only trite, but completely overused. If you can talk your clients into it, avoid them.

- mission critical
- paradigm shift (or anything paradigm, for that matter)
- facilitate
- key performance indicators (just freakin' tell me what they are)
- knowledge transfer (can we just say train or educate?)
- administrate (is that even a word?)
- leverage
- critical anything
- synergy

Got any favorite peeves?

Ethics and Common Sense

Writer friend and I were talking about journalistic ethics again. It's a topic we bring up on occasion, and it's one that leaves us both shaking our heads. We mainly lament the lack of ethics courses in various college journalism/media concentrations. We wonder out loud and to each other, where exactly do these new journalists and media people learn their ethics? I chimed in that common sense should rule, but again, if your parents taught you no common sense, how are you going to know where to draw the line?

This came up after I'd talked to my youngest about her college Ethics course. I was more than a little surprised that her major - Communications and Mass Media - does not require a Journalism Ethics course. Nope. Instead, she talked about religious ethics, which may help but doesn't exactly outline plagiarism and copyright law.

Here on this blog I've brought up various situations of unethical behavior, such as the dude who removed attributes from an article I supplied. Then there was the dude who wrote a book based on the content of several other books, blatantly lifting ideas from others' pages and claiming them as his own. Oh, and let's not forget the editor who, when reading a freelancer's query proposal, said without another thought "Which one of you staffers wants to write this?" It shocks me how often people in creative professions will leave numerous footprints all over ethical standards. But again, don't you have to be taught those?

So here are a few ethical lines you should not cross:

- When in doubt, don't.

- If you didn't write it, you have to give credit to the one who did.

- If you like someone else's idea, congratulate them. Don't reword it or revise it or otherwise steal it and call it yours.

- If you quote another source, you MUST give attribution.

We as writers have to take a hard conservative line. If the schools aren't going to help the next generation (or even the current one) to understand what's ethical and what's not, we have to police our own ranks.

I know some of you have had website copy lifted and reprinted without your permission. How did the offender respond? What else have you experienced?

If the Shoe Doesn't Fit

Today's the day I tell a prospective client that his project is not a good fit for me. It's unfortunate as I think the guy's nice, but I've asked repeatedly for and have not received the project outline or notes. What I have received are musings that are nowhere near related to the project as outlined in our client meeting. Each request from me garners one more unrelated snippet or link to something funny or some other story that's just not what we talked about. Maybe they're all supposed to be related. If so, I'm still backing away. If the communication at this stage in the process is so out of whack, imagine trying to bring order to it once we get underway.

That, however, is not the only reason I'm dropping the project.

There seems to be a level of heightened expectations about how this straightforward project will somehow solve numerous personal crises for the client. I'm a writer. I'm not a therapist, life coach, custody attorney, divorce mediator, or savior. It's too much to be expected of one person. When I met with him, I had my doubts, but he was genuinely nice and had what appeared to be a pretty standard project goal. Since that meeting, I've come to realize there's just too much emotion attached (and we're talking from additional family members who have also contacted me since that client meeting) for me. Way too much.

And to add one more level of "No you didn't" to it, he introduced me to his friend and said, "She's writing my project for me - we're paying her with the proceeds of the pre-sale!" Oh no you're not. I work for present currency, not potential currency.

The toughest thing you as a freelancer will face is walking away from a promised check. But there are projects (and people) that just don't fit. Suppose I took this project based on this client's promise of "payment from proceeds." What if only 25 people pre-order the book? What if only 3 do? Please, if you're ever offered a "percentage of sales" or any other "promise" of future payment, turn and run.

Suppose also I did get payment up front (as you should, too), but the project didn't deliver what the client expected (all those emotional/legal additions that are his and his alone). How can I, as a writer, take on a project for someone who expects the project to say pay for his father's nursing care or avert his neighbor's impending lawsuit against him? I can't. And his disappointment may land us in court should he decide I didn't do a good enough job. Again, run.

There's no need to mention what bad communication between your client and you can result in. You already know. And hopefully by now you can see those red flags waving and have learned to avoid them at all costs.

We've all taken on projects we shouldn't have and have lived to regret it. What are some of yours? Do you have any deal breakers that help you decide?

Happy New You

We were at the local coffee house open mic last night. One of the performers looked into the crowd and said, "Happy New You. I won't say happy New Year because if you don't change you, it's going to be the same as last year, isn't it?"

Light bulb moment.

We're so busy looking at this clean slate of a year and wondering just how many significant and insignificant promises to ourselves we can cram into it that we fail to realize that without some actual movement from us, we're not getting any closer to any goal. So if the goals you develop - the business plans and the diet plans and the plans to stop this bad habit and start that good one - are sound yet they never make it to fruition, the problem, my friend, is your approach.

When I first started freelancing, I had this mentality that every job was an alignment of my talents and friendship with a client and friend. Wrong. The minute you enter friendship into the equation, you lose your objectivity. You can't add late fees to your friend's invoice! You can't push back on a friend and tell him or her that the idea is weak! And you can't conduct business as it should be conducted - professionally. I had to stop being a friend and start being a business owner.

Maybe your problem is you doubt your worth. That's a tougher one to overcome, but believe me, the moment you realize this is a job like any other job and you have something these clients need, it becomes easier to charge what you're worth and push doubt aside. Nevertheless, there will be clients who criticize your work. And they may be right. Your job is to look at that criticism and determine where it's coming from. Just don't take it personally. This is not a personal endeavor - it's business. If you can't train yourself to think as a business owner, hire a coach (Lisa's amazing) or take a business course so that you can start seeing this as something other than your life's passion.

Or maybe the problem is you just don't know how to market. That's much easier to solve, for I've blathered on endlessly about how to do so effectively(check out the Marketing Series and Marketing tags on this blog), as have many of the folks whose links appear to the left of this blog (Anne Wayman in particular has devoted years of free time putting up articles on her site that answer nearly every question you could possibly have). There are book resources aplenty, and even a few webcasts if you search. I won't do the searching for you. Some things you have to do for yourself. It makes the successes you'll reap that much more sweet.

So what are your plans for reinventing you this year? In what areas do you need to change your mindset?

Resolving Not to Resolve

I hate resolutions. Never has there been any other form of self-promise and goal setting that was doomed to fail at the outset. We make them and instantly break them. Why? Because we aim too high, dream beyond our own abilities, bite off more than we can chew (or chew more than we should - diets and all)...

I saw a few experts on the Today Show last week talking about why we're so miserable at resolutions. It's because we don't know how to narrow things down. We're so busy with the big picture - such as "I'm going to lose 20 pounds this year!" - that we never really get to the details that make it happen. It's why we fail and why I've stopped making resolutions altogether.

Those experts say that resolving to do something big is just pointless. Instead, resolve to spend one minute a day exercising. That's right - one minute. It's a little change, but it's one that sets you on a different course and gets your mind trained to think differently - even slightly - about the way you do things. One woman who vowed to exercise for a minute a day lost those 20 pounds. It's because a minute is do-able. A minute costs you nothing. A minute, while small, caused her to start thinking "Hey, I can do this."

That's how I approached my business last year at this time. I went over my big-picture plan - to earn more - and added monthly goals, and weekly benchmarks. I kept myself in line by making myself accountable much more often. It worked. I earned about 15K more than I planned to earn, which that number in itself was higher than I usually earned. All this during the Year of the Recession.

So how about you? Are you seeing a big picture only? If so, take some time today or tomorrow (or the next day or even next week - it's never too late) to determine how you're going to meet that goal and what it'll take from you monthly, weekly, daily to keep you on track. It's more than how much you'll need to earn monthly. It's about how to find your clients, how to score more work, how to pace yourself so that you can be cashing checks in the lean months....stick around. We'll talk about all this in the weeks to come. Meantime, tell me what worked for you last year. How did you reach a goal, a series of goals, and how can we emulate that?