Let’s give some shape to the book. On the journey from miserable fed-up wretch behind an empty desk to a happy, worried, excited puppy behind a differently empty desk you need to consider some overall themes. Although these are embedded in each chapter it is worth collecting them up in one place so that you can see them and tuck them into your conscious memory. Keeping things in sight is a good idea, and the fun way to do this is to drum up an acronym. You know: the sort of thing that experts at conferences always intimidate you with, having spent 10 years researching at the School of Flaky Management, department of Advanced Acronyms.
Some of these people are gurus and spend their sad lives living at the top of a saintly management pole. Some of them live in the real world and enrich our working lives with their shrewd observations. However, increasingly there is a tendency for people to forget that there is as much bollocks and showmanship in management and business theory as there ever was in a nineteenth-century travelling vaudeville show. Gasp at the latest theory, applaud the business boffin with a bad perm, or jot down the latest buzz word in your executive PDA. PT Barnum would be proud.
Because a selfer needs to work to eat, we need to keep things simple. If your business is loaded onto a PDA and it breaks, you’re shagged. If you drop your diary it will bounce. If you drop your PDA it will break. Your business will break with it, and don’t kid yourself that you will have backed everything up, because in my experience people can be really slack about this.
Business is not and does not have to be complicated. If the pyramids were built without batteries and the Wright Brothers pioneered powered flight without the use of SatNav and an arm-rest television, your business can be built from the ground up in the most simple, cost-effective way possible. Keep business simple. Even airline pilots are selected on the basis of having one big thumb, which they use to switch on the autopilot. If you make life all complicated and squiggly on day one, you will load down your poor old biplane with a drinks trolley, and mess it up. And if you do that, you will get spanked. But not in a sexy way. No sir, you’ll get spanked in a way that will leave your bottom sore for six months.
Before you go onto the internet to look up spank, spanking or spanked – and I suggest you don’t if there are kiddies in the room – (so I’m told) what we have here is a word designed to knit together the key themes that you have to be mindful of in order to power your business off the foggy runway of hope and into the inky blue sky of your dreams. The word has been carefully machined out of an ingot of pure usefulness. It’s a word you will remember, an acronym to fling at people with cheery abandon, in order to combat some of the more sterile and no less contrived acronyms currently polluting the world of business.
Our word is SPANK and the bottom-smackingly relevant themes are:
S |
Self – you are the talent and the key limiting factor on your business. |
P |
Planning – plan for cash, for uncertainty, for busy periods and for rainy days. |
A |
Assumptions – you will live or die by the ones you make. |
N |
Networking – get on your bike and tell the world you exist. |
K |
Kick ass – whip up your motivation, drive and determination and then let rip. |
Self comes first because you are your business, and its level of sucwcess or failure is directly attributable to what you think, feel and do.
If you plan, then the risk of sudden cash shortages is reduced, time is made better use of, and people tend not to find themselves buying the Christmas turkey at Easter.
I shall make an assumption here: that we all make assumptions: such as that people who say they are successful must be telling the truth, that people who are told a price assume it is the lowest price on offer, and that to be successful you need at least four business degrees in assorted flavours. All of these assumptions are, to borrow a phrase, horseshit.
After assumptions we have networking, the big shh ... you know what, which we shall return to in a later chapter.
Finally we have kick ass because to work for yourself, in whatever capacity, means taking pot-shots at the market place so that you stamp out your presence and start to win customers.
To return to assumptions, it is easy to say ‘check out your assumptions’ and tougher to do it. They are sneaky snakes which slide up our trousers without us noticing, until their little fangs bite into our soft parts, with devastating results. You could wear bicycle clips at all times to keep the reptiles out, but they might just draw some curious looks from those not in the know. To avoid sartorial embarrassment, think about the following general assumptions which I have heard from several clients. Which ones do you recognize?
If I set up in business people will buy my products or services.
Answer: why the hell should they, when there are perfectly reasonable people already providing the same thing already?
When I am in business it’s OK to put all my receipts in a shoe box and leave them there until year end.
Whoa there, horsey. I don’t know any accountants who use shoe boxes, so take a tip from them. The accounting shoe box is the business equivalent of a Christmas present from Great Aunt Monolith: you know, the one with the goatee and the pulsating wart. At some point you are going to have to open both the box and the present, and who knows what disasters will be waiting for you. At least with the Great Aunt all you have to do is kiss her. This is much more pleasant than shovelling through a pile of receipts at year end, because your Great Aunt is not going to bankrupt you, whereas ignorance of your cashflow could.
Be warned. Ignorance makes a poor business partner, and without cash you will have to give old Monolith a big tonguey one to keep your baby business afloat. Yuk! We shall return to the perils of the shoe box at the end of the book, with a couple of cautionary tales to do with business accounting.
People will buy my products for the price I ask.
Be careful. If you want to sell a bunch of flowers for £10 and everyone else sells them for £8, then either you will sell nothing, or you will have to think of a way to justify your price. When you work out how much you need to sell your products for, it pays to salt your numbers with some local research, or to reduce your optimism to avoid a nasty surprise.
I know how much it will cost to set up and run my business.
No you don’t. You can have a guess and add 20 per cent to be cautious, because things in life always seem to cost more. Every time I go to the supermarket, intent on picking up a few essentials, I always come away with more than I need, but just the right amount that I want. I’m a sucker for ‘new’ things and for shiny packaging. Have you noticed how the price of items is not on the packet itself? Once the goods are in your trolley you have no idea how much the bill is going to be, and business can be the same. Despite your best intentions to be frugal there is always something extra to buy. I have spent about 10 times more on personal training than I ever thought I would need to. It’s money well spent, just not money well budgeted for!
Be cautious and always add in some sort of contingency. I mean, you would if you were having the builders round, wouldn’t you?
My family has the stamina to go through with it.
Hmm ... Don’t overlook the fact that the people closest to you will invest emotionally in your business. Don’t assume that you have enough credit in the Bank of Family to allow you to fund your venture. Talk to them and find out how much time they will support you for, or whether they are prepared to see little of you whilst you toil away to get things going. Or how happy they are that you’re going to delay buying the latest high-definition, fold-away flatscreen television and combined drinks cabinet because you need to spend the money on a big roll of packing tape.
From the moment you push the go button on your new venture, you keep drawing on your credit at the Bank of Family, and if this gets overstretched they may just call in the debt. If they do that, the emotional bailiffs will come round and will repossess your heart.
To be successful in business we all need to have happy bottoms, and that means not getting spanked. When I started out I made most of the above assumptions, didn’t think about my own limitations enough, planned only for the next six months, nearly drowned in assumptions, avoided networking and only kicked ass when my wife kicked ass with me. And I made some assumptions – did I mention that?
My original business plan had me working only as a coach. To be successful I needed 20 clients a month who would all pay me the same amount. I didn’t think about the cost of running my car, the difficulty of finding and maintaining such a client list, and even the time taken to research, interview and win new customers. I assumed that it would all fall into place. I even nearly turned down a chance to join a networking group, on the grounds that I was a) scared to talk to people and b) found the idea somehow beneath me. Then just to rub salt into a raw wound, I proudly announced to my wife that I would do nothing for three months, whilst I qualified in psychometric profiling.
I had no idea how much in love I was with my big plan, and completely missed the reality of it all. However, once the money started to flow out of the house and the bills began to stack up, I realized a fundamental truth about business: you can’t sell if you are sitting at home in front of your laptop. So I went out selling and never looked back.
All of this was extracting credit from my Bank of Family at a hideous rate, and although I’m successful today, I’m still paying off the emotional overdraft that I racked up to keep the bailiffs away. It hurts!
Stop here and catch your breath.
There are two things to add to your personal planning kit. They are to do with the assumptions you are making and the amount of credit you have with those closest to you.
It might help to grab a biscuit and a hot milky drink here to sustain you through your thinking. You might also want to fiddle with some rough numbers and see whether they add up and your business looks viable, or in business argot, whether it has legs. The profit you will make is the total income you generate from sales less the cost of running your business. Remember that until you’ve been in business a year, you don’t really know these numbers.
Please don’t fall into the trap of working out all your costs first and then just add on enough sales to cover them, because people who do this tend to have a nasty habit of buying luxury cars, oak-veneered shop interiors, Gucci toolboxes, or thermonuclear powered laptops.
Given that lots of business people have failed at some point, but only talk about their successes, it is likely that you will only ever hear good news from them. I have seen some people go bankrupt, and others come close, because they made silly mistakes and fell in love with their dream, instead of falling in love with the harsh reality of being a selfer. As the sages have it:
Business is business. If you want a friend, get a dog.
I like this and would add:
Don’t get spanked. Get wise and keep your bottom happy. So there I was, at home again with no job and possible success just a whistling train in the distance. A train that might or might not come puffing into my station on time. Bugger!
Except this time I was excited and full of hope. The world had stopped turning for a moment and all around was silence. I had decided to stop working for other people and instead to embark on a journey which would swing between the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, sometimes all on the same day and occasionally in the same hour.
Then the spell was broken by my wife, who looked around the smart new house that we had moved into only six months before, and said sadly, ‘I suppose this will have to go.’