Archive for the ‘Contracting’ Category

One of the problems that can occur with the feast-and-famine cycle for contractors, freelancers and small business owners is the funny logic that begins when we are in the famine mode.   When we are sitting around, bored, looking for work, sometimes logic can fly straight out of the window.   This is especially true when it comes to maths.

At the end of the famine stage, it may be that a contractor or freelancer is sitting with a variety of paths open to them – with roads leading to different contracts, or with 2 or 3 potential new customers, not knowing which one to take or put the most effort into landing.

The boredom, the need to be active, but also the desperate need for money may cause us to jump in the wrong direction.

Let’s say that a contract or freelance job is offered which pays (for the sake of keeping things simple) a rate of £500 or $500 a day.  But, there is the prospect of another job or contract which pays £600/$600 a day, but won’t come in for another week.

In a world where the chances of getting both are equal, the obvious choice is the one that pays the more money.  Right?

But hold on.  If we have 5 days of unproductive time to wait for the higher rate work – that actually dilutes the value of the 2^nd job – the average day rate is reduced when we factor in the 5 days of unpaid time.

Assuming that the contract or job runs for a month, the immediate start contract pays a day rate of £500/$500 – as no unproductive additional time needs to be factored in.  However, the £600/$600 job is actually reduced to £490/$490 (1 month equals around 23 workable days, PLUS the 5 bench days = 28 days).

So waiting to take the higher paid work would actually cost you £230/$230 in lost revenue over the course of the month.  Whilst this figure may not be high, is still a reduction in earnings.   When you add in the week of sitting around, maybe the choice is not so obvious after all.

I am going to share a Contract Search tip which was emailed to me by a long term reader of this blog (so a big thanks to Rob).  It’s a very useful tip for those looking for the next freelance gig or contract job.

Rob says when you are applying to 5 or 6 contract/freelance jobs every day, it can quickly become confusing on what you have applied for, what jobs need what skills, and which agent was used for what position.

To aid in the search, Rob cleverly uses Evernote.   When Rob replies to an emailed job, or just before he hits the ‘apply’ button on the web based job board, Rob highlights the job detail text and uses the Evenote web/text clipper to add a new note into a new Evernote ‘Contracts Applied For’ folder.

If an agent calls or emails him back, it’s a quick task then to pop into Evernote, search on the agents name (or company), and all the posts applied for through the agent are listed.

It’s also a useful tip for checking that you are not applying for the same position again where it is re-listed in the jobs board, or is going through more than one agent.

If you have never used Evernote before, the clipper function is an add-on which installs itself as a tool button into most browsers and MS Office/Mac programs and allows you to quickly highlight text and add it as a new Evernote note.  The clipper can be downloaded from the Evernote add-on site.

Thanks for the tip Rob.

Last week I learnt an interesting fact from a friend who works in a contract placement agency.  Of all the emails he receives in his in tray from people looking for placement in contract or freelance positions, he only ever looks at about 10%.  Put it another way, 90% of people responding for a contract job fall at the first hurdle.

He suggested to me that this was fairly typical now for most of his fellow workers – they all ignored the vast majority of CVs and Résumés that were sent to them.   And this ‘ignored’ number is growing.

When I enquired why this was the case, he shared the following tip, which I now pass on:

Relevance

That was the word he used.   He had no idea if any of the candidates were relevant to the positions he had open.

He was in no doubt that the contract and freelance market was tough – very tough – and getting worse by the week.   Two years ago for every position he had managed to open in the market, he would have between 10 and 20 applicants.   Today, it’s more like 70 to 100.

Of course of these 100 applicants, many are also applying for 5, 6 or 7 contract positions in a day – and there lies the problem.   If he posts 3 contract positions online, by the afternoon he will have around 300 emails with attached CVs – it would take him more than a day to go through all of them.

How could he possibly know which to pick from all of that noise?

Why the Cover Email is King

In his view, the cover email (or letter) was far more important than the CV.  The contract or freelance agent is the first (and main) filter between the candidate and the client.  That is why the cover email needs to give enough reason for the agent to open the CV.

He suggested the following tips are the difference between him calling a candidate, and simply pressing the DELETE key on the email:

1. Keep It Short – The cover email needs to be short – as short as possible.  They don’t have time to read war and peace in an email – keep to the facts.
2. Reference the Position – If you are applying for a contract role, quote the contract reference number or as a minimum, the job title.  He said it was amazing how many emails he got which talked about “applying for the role” when he was juggling 12 or 20 roles.
3. List the skills THAT MATCH – the only way your CV will be looked at is if you have skills that the client needs – so list why you are a match for the position in the cover letter.  Cover the skills required, but don’t expand into unrelated skills.
4. Current Status – Show your current status.  Are you currently in a contract, in a full time job, available now, looking for something in 6 months time – he needs to match your availability with his clients requirement.
5. 5. What you are looking for – Indicate where you will work in terms of geographical location.  Again, this needs to match his clients requirement.  Also, say what your minimum day rate is – most jobs are listed as “Market Rate” – but he needs to know what you would accept.
6. Contact Details – Finally, make his life easy.  Include a telephone number that he can contact you on – mobile is best.

What to Take Away from all of this

In a nutshell,  make the cover email specific to the role.  If you are applying through an on-line contract search system, NEVER use the option for a standard cover letter – this is what most people use, it does not cover the points above, and it will mean that your CV will end up in the recycle bin.

I am sure it has not escaped you that we are less than one month away from Christmas.

Whilst we are all cutting back this year (as the world teeters on the edge of yet another financial meltdown), Christmas still brings the awful few weeks of worrying about what to buy people.  What do they need, what do they want, what will not make us look like a Scrooge?

As a contractor, freelancer or small business owner, we have the advantage of needing gifts that can work both for us, and for our businesses.  So if you are fed up with yet more socks, bath salts or wall calendars, can I suggest a business Christmas list which you may like to consider and pass on to those stuck for something to buy you?

• Business Books – A little boring, but some can be very useful.  Ones I suggest include the Ultimate Small Business Marketing Book, The ultimate Guide to Google Adwords and The Wealthy Freelancer.
• Tablet Computer – If you don’t own one, a tablet can be very useful.   And tablets are coming down in price all the time (you can get tablets for just over £100).   If you don’t yet have one, it will revolutionise your world.
• A scanner – you can do away with all that paperwork and keep electronic files as described here.  Scanners can be purchased from as little as £30.
• A day at a spa – We all need a break from the day to day grind.  A day of relaxation can be used to rest, relax, recharge and most importantly, plan next year’s activities.  Spa days can be expensive, but a ‘trail’ day can be as little as £30.
• Stamps – Again, seems boring but… a) They won’t devalue, b) Purchased now they will be worth more when postage costs go up in the new year (in both the UA and UK), c) They are always needed and d) Can start you off with a new year mail shot campaign.  Much better than gift tokens.
• An extra monitor – If you use your computer a lot and you still only have 1 (or 2) monitor, an extra monitor will increase your efficiency.  Monitors can start from just £60.
• A better chair – If you spend a lot of time sitting and working, a good chair can make all the difference.  Chairs don’t have to be expensive, but avoid the ‘make it yourself’ variety as sold by Staples as these will be uncomfortable after an hour or so.
• An e-book Reader – one of the modern ebook readers (such as the Amazon Kindle) is perfect for catching up on your reading, whether it is novels, business books or blogs.
• A Love Film or Netflix subscription – DVD disks are becoming a little passé.  A much better option is the gift of a LoveFilm (UK) or Netflix (UK or USA) subscription which can allow rental of movies or streaming to your home.   Use it to catch up on movies which will motivate you to new business heights.
• A portable phone charger  - our mobile devices are the communication hubs of our businesses, so to have one low on power is a disaster.   With a cheap portable battery pack, a dead phone is never now a problem.

Let me ask you a question?  What is the worst thing that could happen to your contracting, freelancing or small business?

I would imagine right up there with going bust and being sued is a visit from the tax man.   It’s never happened to me (and touch wood never will), but we all know that when the HMRC (or whoever your particular taxman works for) comes-a-knocking, we better have good records to back up all our business activities.

But do you really want all that paperwork floating around or sitting in files taking up space?

Paper Vs Electronic Storage – the UK Law

Following the UK Electronic Communications act 2000, an electronic form of document is deemed sufficient evidence in law.  That goes for contracts, agreements and of course receipts (seek your own legal advice to be sure).

This means if you have a scanned copy, then that is good enough for the taxman.  This also means you no longer have to store paper copies of everything.

Scanners and their problems

However, there is a problem in transforming everything from paper into bits and bytes.  When you go out and buy a dedicated scanner or multi-function printer/scanner, the device does not know what you are scanning.  It doesn’t know if that page of A4 is an invoice or a purchase order.

Scan all your invoices, receipts, orders or contracts and all you end up with is a big mess of PDF files named SCAN0001.PDF, SCAN0002.PDF and so on.  Whether you scan to JPEG, TIF or PDF – the sequential numbering of files generated actually makes the problem worse.

How do you find that critical contract when you have 5,000 PDFs and they have file names of SCAN00001 through to SCAN05000?

If you are lucky and prepared to spend the money, some scanners will perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the documents.  Whilst this will slow down the scanning process, it does mean you can Windows (or Mac) search the PDFs for a known phrase.  But what about if you don’t know what text was on the contract?

There is a solution.

Decent PDF names

Over time, I have come to find that scanning to a PDF is the best option.  PDF scans will deal with multiple pages and front/back scanning (the term for this is Duplex) a lot better than scanning to a graphical format such as JPEG or TIFF.

Assuming you also want to scan to PDF, there is a free utility available created by a chap named Michael Weiner which allows the batch renaming of PDF files.   The great thing about this utility is that it cycles through all PDFs in a directory, displays them on screen, asks what you want to call it, and then renames the file for you.  The utility can be downloaded free here.

The way I scan my documents is that I scan any documents on receipt (or save received PDFs) to a directory then each weekend I quickly run through them using this utility, giving them decent names.  Once renamed, I then file them away.

Incidentally, I also save invoices and notes that are emailed to me in the same way.  I simply print any documents received to PDF (using the Free CutePDF virtual printer).  This installs a new virtual printer on your computer and you can then print any format of document to a new PDF file (via printing to the virtual printer) which I then save in the same location.

Storage Options

Once you have your collection of PDFs, what to do with them?   The system you select will depend on how fancy you want to be, how secure, how many documents you are likely to store, and of course how much you want to spend.

Here are some suggestions:

Accounts System – For any business money based documents (receipts, invoices, etc) I would recommend uploading them to your on-line accounting system.  I use Freeagent for all my money business processing, and I upload all documents associated to incomings and outgoings as I record them on Freeagent.   Everything is then easily at hand and Freegant deals with the storage and backup of the documents.

Evernote – If you are an Evernote user, then all the documents can be uploaded to Evernote.  This has the advantages that Evernote will automatically OCR your documents for later searching and you can create folders for different document types.  However, whilst the basic account of Evernote is free, uploading large amounts of PDFs will soon move you into the realms of a paid account.

Windows/Mac File Store – the cheap and cheerful solution is to simply keep them in a windows or Mac file directory somewhere on your computer’s hard disk.  As with Evernote you could keep them all in one big directory, or have sub-directories for different categories and document types (such as invoices, contracts etc).  Just remember to perform regular backups of your file store.

Sharepoint – My own personal product of choice is Microsoft Sharepoint (as I have a home Windows server anyway).  Sharepoint comes in a variety of sizes, styles and prices.  As I was using sharepoint for the storage of my general business documents (via integration to office), it seemed the logical choice to store my PDFs there as well.

Third Party Applications – Finally, there are a variety of paid for and free Document Management solutions available, including products such as OpenDocMan which is one of the better open source document storage systems.

Happy scanning.

?So as a level headed independent business owner (or contractor or freelancer) you have all your backup plans in place, right?  You have your systems backed up to disk or removable media, you have your company insurance in place, and I am sure you have backup copies of all your important documents, yes?

And what about you?  Do you have a backup of the physical you?  I mean, what happens if something happens to you?

Regardless of what country you live in, one of the problems you will face is that the worlds health services are stretched to breaking point.  In the USA, a great health reform (or should that be revolution) is underway.  Even here in the UK, where we are supposed to have the best health service in the world, the last thing you need when you fall ill is to find yourself at the back of an 18 week wait for a consultation – especially if you can’t work whilst you are waiting.

You are your own best asset

If you are anything like me, your company revolves around you.  Yes, you may have computers, systems and software, but you are your company.  Without you, your company grinds to a halt.  And whilst we all may suffer the odd cold or flu bout which we can either work through or take a couple of days off, what happens if something more serious happens?

Can your company afford to be moth-balled for 4 or 5 months whilst you recover from a broken arm, torn muscle or appendicitis?

Regardless of the level of public health available in your own area, there will be wait times – ranging from days to several months depending on what is wrong with you and where you live.  Personally, if something happens, I want to be in front of a specialist the next day and back on my feet, earning money, as soon as possible.

That’s where private health care comes in.

Options for Private Medical Care

Here in the UK, there are a number of suppliers of private health care to supplement public health.

You can opt to pay for private healthcare yourself (which carries no tax implications), have your company pay for you as a named individual (which effects your tax code), or have your company pay for you as part of your directors status (which carries no tax burden – but best speak to your accountant for tax advice).

The cost per month will vary based on your age and medical history, but a typical cost for a 40 year old will be around £50 a month for a reasonable level of cover.  This will provide all the insurance you need, covering all medical bills from initial consultation through to completed treatment.

Companies in the UK worth looking at include:

Bupa – the big name in private health care (the one I personally use), with a variety of options including sickness pay

Nuffield – Like Bupa, Nuffield have their own hospitals up and down the country, and  provide a wide range of options

AXA PPP – The AXA private Patients Plan provides insurance allowing you to go private when the need arises.  AXA uses other private health providers facilities.

Money Supermarket – Whilst not a health provider themselves, the money supermarket web site allows you to search a wide range of insurance companies who can meet your needs.

PCG Insurers – The PCG (professional Contractors Group) have a wide range of sponsored insurance suppliers who can provide quotations for private medical insurance.

One final note.  Private Medical Insurance cover is completely different from Life Insurance (which pay up if/when you die) and Disability Insurance (which pay up if you can no longer work).  These are worth looking into as separate options if these areas concern you.

On Wednesday last week, I produced 32 hours worth of coding output.  But unlike my reckless younger self, I did not have to put in an ‘all nighter’ or work two days flat without a break (I was known to do both when I was 18).  No, on this particular Wednesday, I got out of bed at 7am, started work, finished at a little before 4:40pm, and yet had produced 32 hours worth of code.

I had done this through Evernote.   I have talked about Evernote before, but thought I would share how I use this marvel of technology.

Ripping Apart Projects with Evernote

Whenever I complete a project for a customer, I add 3 or 4 hours of project time into my plans.  When the project is delivered, just before I file it away to my document storage system, I then rip it apart.  I run through all of the code I have produced, looking for the ‘clever stuff’ – code that does a particular function, or overcomes a problem, or is just generally useful.

All these bits of code then get copied to Evernote in one of a dozen different areas.  I have areas for VB.NET, C#.net, SQL scripts, SQL tricks, DOS commands, VBA, VBS, and a host of others.  Sometimes I copy 3 or 4 lines of code, sometimes its entire routines, sometimes whole files.   Each gets a good title of what it is it does.

How I worked 32 hours

So on this particular Wednesday, I thought as an experiment I would list what I was going to do, and how long it would take me to code from scratch.  Then I coded it in my usual way – coding some of it by hand, but finding large blocks already coded in Evernote, and i just copy, paste and tweak.   I like to think of myself as a bit of a Frankenstein of a coder.

The result is that in a little over 7 hours or work time, I had coded what I estimated would have taken me 32-34 hours by hand.   And of course there is the bonus – the copied code has already been used, therefore tested, therefore less bugs when reused, therefore less testing needed.

So I worked 7 hours, the code should have taken 32 hours; what do you think the customer got billed, 7 or 32 hours?  Who do you think got the difference in to their bank account?

Why Evernote?

All the tools I use (such as Visual Studio) have their own snippet catalogue systems, and I could use those.  So why do I use Evernote?  Simple – portability.   I can see my notes on my PC, on my phone, on my tablet, and at a customer site.  It’s all searchable, all findable, quick, easy and free.

Bless you Evernote for making me more productive, and allowing me to bill more than I could possibly work.

Just call me Professor Frankenstein.

Do you keep a journal?  I don’t mean a scheduling of upcoming events and appointments, I mean a historical diary – as in the things that teenage girls are normally associated with (that may seem slightly sexist, but it’s generally accepted that boys don’t keep diaries).

Diaries and Journals can be life savers for contractors, freelancers and small business owners when you need to refer back about when things happened, who said what, when and the timeline of problems.   Somebody who can say in a meeting “Phil confirmed to switch off the server at 4:15pm on Tuesday 12^th” is going to be believed more than somebody who responds with “yes, but somebody, I think it was Tony, said not to – he may have said this on the Monday or the Wednesday – I think it may have been Wednesday”.

Diaries and journals don’t have to be big.  Business journals don’t have to be war and peace on everything that happened at every point in a day, but can be very useful to record key points as they occur.

I keep an electronic journal and quick but important events I like to record include:

• Go ahead’s during phone calls
• Key decisions (during a meeting or a chat, somebody says to go with option A or delay the project)
• When people promise to get back to me
• Dates when I send out documents, contracts or invoices
• Notes about disagreements, who was involved and how it was resolved

There are plenty of ways of keeping a journal.  For some, paper will work, but for me Electronic is best.  I keep an electronic journal on my Android Tablet (always with me during the working day).  Having an electronic journal means I can very quickly add a note, categorize it (normally by customer/prospect) and then quickly search for the key information.

Electronic journals are available on PCs (one is already available in Outlook), for iPhones/iPADS and of course Android (I use Orange Diary for android which I can recommend).

Making an entry during a phone conversation or meeting takes me just 10 or 20 seconds, but it has saved my bacon on a number of occasions.

Over the last couple of months, I have seen a few other freelancing and small business blogs talk about things to do when work dries up.  I guess maybe this is a common topic because the economy is still suffering (so I am told).

My problem with such lists is that they are all painting around the edges with suggestions such as “catch up with filing” or “tidy your storage system” – which is all fine, but I imagine that most freelancers, contractors and small business bods would rather be doing productive work earning cash than taking time to “spruce up your office plants”.

So may I present:

an alternative top 20 list of things to try when things turn quiet:

1. Setup or refine adwords – If you don’t have an adwords account, set one up to advertise your services.  If you do have adwords in place, try some new ad variations and A/B split test the adverts.
2. Refresh your web site – Bring it up to date, and create landing pages for your core skills – linking them to your adword (or other) adverts.
3. Create marketing material – Create a brochure, flyers and other material for sales presentations, networking and meetings
4. Create client case studies – Case studies create a strong story and you can never have too many.  Have them in both printed and web based formats.
5. Update your CV – Bring your CV up to date with your latest activities, skills and training
6. Scour the contracts boards – There are plenty of web boards with both contract and freelance positions available.   Search them every morning and the phone will start ringing.
7. Start an a/b split test on your web content – You web site may be good, but could it be better?  Use A&B testing to see if your visitors agree. I am going to talk about A&B testing tomorrow.
8. Write to previous customers – Use your list of contacts, and send them a (good) mailshot asking if they need more work done.
9. Make contact with other freelancers for any off shoot work – Use your outlook, Gmail or Linkedin contacts list and make contacts with your social peers in case they need a helping hand
10. Send a mailshot to likely local customers – People love to buy local.  Hit the yellow pages and send a mailshot to local companies who could use your services
11. Lean a new skill through a 30 day teach yourself book – There are lots of great books available to teach you new skills.  Take the time to add to your skill set.
12. Streamline your business processes – Look at all the aspects of your business from quotation, to invoicing to support.  Are there any parts that can be improved, streamlined or automated.
13. Invent a value add to your service – Can you take the slack time to add a new feature of benefit which would make you or your product more sellable?
14. Create an off line revenue generation idea – Do some brain storming and start a bolt-on enterprise to generate money whilst you sleep.
15. Look for more LinkedIn contacts, and tell all contacts of your availability – If you haven’t updated your LinkedIn contacts for a while, time to see who else is worth adding
16. Review your company spending costs – If times are lean, maybe it’s time to review your company spending and see what costs can be cut to increase profit
17. Think about taking on a short term Contract – You may prefer working from home on a freelance basis, but when times are tough, don’t rule out taking a short contract through an agency.  Very short (day or week length) contracts sometimes pay very well.
18. Spend time doing a technology refresh – Look at the tools that you use – can they do with a clean up or upgrade?
19. Investigate (R&D) on new products – Things are always changing.  Take some time to do some web research or attend open events.  What new products are out there, what are suppliers launching?
20. Clean your environment and do filing whilst you wait for work to come on – And of course the office clean.  But only when you have done everything else and are waiting for the phone to ring.

The other day, I was a customer site working on a project, and the atmosphere there was tense.   In the IT department, 2 contractors were about to be told that their services were no longer required.   Letting people go is never nice, but in this situation it was a strange decision because the client still had work to be done, and had plenty of money to pay for external services.

So why were the contractors being released (let go, fired, whatever term you would like to use)?   It wasn’t because they were not working hard or because their work was sub-standard, but because they were not doing the job they were brought in to do.

These two contractors were being helpful; too helpful.   Whenever anybody had a question – they could answer it.  Whenever anybody had a problem, they would help fix it.  They were the original ‘go to’ pair – but this meant that the work they were tasked to do was not getting done.

Which leads me onto SEP.  Its three letters I bear in mind when I am working with clients.   SEP stands for Somebody Else’s Problem.

There have been many times when I have been on a customer site and I have overheard a conversation about IT problems of various kinds.   My helpful bone twitches and I want to wade in to show my expertise with their problem – dive onto a keyboard and sort the problem out.  But if it’s not related to what I am tasked to do, I will avoid it if it’s an SEP.   It’s not my problem.  It’s not what I am getting paid for.  If the bill payer wants to know where 2 hours have gone in the day, I don’t have to tell them I was helping Bill or Ted out rather than generating their much needed system.

It doesn’t mean I am not helpful.  I may suggest the solution, suggest the term to “Google”, suggest somebody to talk to who can help them.   But if it’s an SEP and I am not being paid to sort it out, I avoid actively getting involved.

And if the two contractors had done the same, they would still be earning the money.